Richard Texier (b. 1955) French

Richard Texier (born in 1955 in Niort) is one of the major figures in contemporary French painting. After studying at the École Spéciale d’Architecture, he obtained a doctorate in visual arts from Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne before moving to New York in 1979. It was during this period that he established the Ateliers Nomades, a creative principle that led him to move his studio according to his travels, from Moscow to Shanghai, and from Villa Noailles to the Cordouan Lighthouse. This mobility has had a lasting influence on his work and his relationship with the landscape.

Since the late 1970s, Richard Texier has developed a body of work in which painting and sculpture become instruments for a personal cosmography. Inspired by early astronomers, ancient scientific treatises, geology, natural phenomena, and foundational mythologies, he seeks less to represent the world than to reveal the invisible forces that permeate it. His paintings function as imaginary cartographies in which constellations, signs, totemic figures, and mental landscapes are organised according to a poetic rather than narrative logic.

This research is grounded in a deeply transdisciplinary practice. Painting, sculpture, printmaking, writing, and scientific inquiry constantly engage in dialogue within a body of work in which each medium contributes to the same investigation into the origins of the world, physical phenomena, and the mechanisms of life. Richard Texier notably developed the concept of Pantheo-Vortex, an artistic philosophy that approaches creation as an exploration of the fundamental energies of the universe.

From the 1990s onwards, his practice expanded significantly into monumental sculpture. Mythological animals, hybrid figures, and large-scale bronzes entered public spaces while extending the research developed through his painting. At the same time, the French State commissioned several monumental tapestries devoted to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, presented notably at the French National Assembly, the European Parliament, and the Musée du Luxembourg. He was also appointed Peintre officiel de la Marine and made an Officer of the Ordre national du Mérite.

Richard Texier’s works are now held in numerous public collections in France and abroad. Galerie Ketabi Bourdet continues its research into his work, notably through the exhibition Cosmographies (1987–2006), which highlights a formative period during which the artist established a distinctive visual language situated at the intersection of abstraction, signs, and a cosmic vision of the world.