Jimmy Richer, Possédé·es.

What is down below is reflected in what there is above.
Hermes Trismegistus, extract from The Emerald Tablet¹

For his latest piece, Jimmy Richer appropriates one of the most important objects in the history of the occult sciences: the tarot. His Tarot du rameau d’or (2020) is composed of 78 cards stemming from chalk drawings on a blackboard, made over an intense three-day work session, digitised, then lightly reworked.
Tarot has its origins in the great courts of 15th century Italian Renaissance. A popular card game, of modular structures and iconography, created to the bespoke order of the great lords of the time. It wasn’t until the 18th century that the first occurrences of tarot card readings appeared, one of whose most renowned practitioners was Antoine Court de Gebelin (1719 / 1725-1784).
If Jimmy Richer has chosen to design a deck of tarot cards, it is undoubtedly because this game shares with his practice a strong attraction for syncretic forces. Tarot’s origins take root in Jewish Kabbalah numerology, are inspired by the symbolic reversal of the present world in medieval carnivals, and draw upon metaphorical associations in Greek mythology. Richer’s work is as fuelled by said ancestral sources as it is by more contemporary ones, such as that
of Belgian graphic artist, Elzo Durt. The work’s title echoes Song VI of the Aeneid, when the Trojan hero Aeneas seizes a golden branch to enter the Underworld.
It is also an undeniable reference to The Golden Bough, a comparative study by the famous ethnologist of myths and religion, James George Frazer (1854-1941).
The origin of Richer’s piece is to be found in a series of drawings
grouped together in the publication, Traité de magie ordinaire, published by the artist in 2018, following his residency in Monflanquin in 2017. This book, a sort of grimoire, or book of spells, details simple formulas on “how not to lose one’s bearings” or “how to recognise somebody one has not yet met”; it could be the product of a marriage between the works of Alfred Jarry and Jacques Carelman’s, wavering between a rationalism of the absurd and the science of reversal. These propositions are all accompanied by a plethora of illustrations destined to become tattoos, made by the artist himself.
In Richer’s practice, both tarot divination and tattoos become new rituals which allow him to question our ways of belief. Having recourse to predetermined actions, the artist endeavours to establish a pact of trust with the visitor, steering him or her to doubt the world and its representations: should one believe or disbelieve these images? Remain a convinced iconoclast, or a hopeless iconophile?
The artist’s questioning of our convictions is upheld by a visual imagination that unfolds through multiple mediums, which he perceives as an infinitely political means of probing our belief systems and the organisation of our societies from which they stem.
Hermes Trismegistus’² quote taken from The Emerald Tablet brings together under one philosophy the constituent elements of the universe and proves their interdependencies. This ancient, mythical text furnishes a symbolic reading of the world in drawing a parallel with singular images. The power of a tarot deck abides precisely where it
can be emancipated from its history. Having understood this, Richer puts forth a tarot oscillating between a work of art, game and ritual, becoming an invaluable tool to deconstruct and rethink the contemporary world and its icons.