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"I a stranger and afraid
In a world I never made"
A.E Houseman, Last Poems, 1992.
Richard Ellis's art is the outward expression of inward self-experience locating an exchange of ideas within painting's official culture. The artist's encounters arise from a deep comprehension of the "self", centered by our own media culture, high and low. His pictures insist that meaningful experiences of the self are available within the real as it has been assembled by popular culture and as a result, he redefines what it means to issue authentic and undisclosed emotion through paint. It must be said that with this success, Richard Ellis and a very few others have restored painting's integrity at a particularly fragile moment in its long and enduring history.
"One of Richard's greatest gifts is his capacity to grasp what the culture constructs as real. His paintings are examples of the human condition; its catastopic outcomes are the result of being bombarded with the endless stream of TV images that encircle us 24 hours a day and these core samples derive specifically from his own psychological terrain, are points of reference of human emotion. What I see as real in his art is a living force of painting's endurance and stability for representation of our 21 St Century culture and therefore painting's inherent durability.
(John Cechulski, "Fragments of Cultural Impurities": Richard Ellis Complete Works, 1994-99, April 1999 (ex.cat).
"What I want is to create a series of work that deals with the very notion of time. By using the video and the "slow-mo" of the remote and the flicking of channels, I was able to see this. Time became an actual material to work with and it seemed important to me to suspend it, neither going forward or backward. By distilling a frozen moment in time, I was then able to separate one idea from the other, creating disjointed narratives, with no beginning or end. "My work and particularly the ambivalent figures that populate them convey noticeably especially in the subject's eyes, a vacant and almost total unacquaintedness of us as well as his or her immediate surroundings construted by the media culture. We are often unnerved and displaced and even uncertain in a world of our own creation."
"I am only interested in that moment where everything is just right, its that moment when I have found a 'subject', a crystallization occurs; a perfect representation of an idea, up to then it is an agonizing search, somewhat like looking for one clue in a forensic crime scene, that crime scene being the culture at large.
"It is also about the idea of putting the right shapes, with the right colours, in the right places, where the compositional make up is vital for the picture to be absolute, giving the viewer a shock by removing the viewer from her own specific reality. I began to perceive that there was a definite relationship between the shapes I constructed and the surroundings in which it resided in. Whether this was a colour relationship or compositional, or a combination of both. This became a beautiful experience, with the idea of expressing a world of the 21st century, that has never been more beautiful."
(From an interview with Caroline Oxley, "Of Strange Collisions and Dislocated Narratives", an interview with Richard Ellis, DEBRIS, Issue No 7, July 2000, pp70-81
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