CASA

For the Frac Occitanie Montpellier, the artist conceived a project entitled CASA. It began as an impressive graphic novel (…) drawn and written by Richer. Then, using the drawings in this book, the artist developed the content for an exhibition (…) displayed on the walls of the Frac Occitanie Montpellier : CASA will take the form of wall drawings onto which other, framed drawings will be hung. In doing so, CASA will de facto become part of the history of these “houses” that artists throughout history have “ornamented” to express human wonder and anxieties in the face of the world. But what makes Jimmy Richer’s project unique is that its very content is fueled by the research of countless contemporaries: archaeologists, anthropologists, specialists in human civilizations from all disciplines; but also geologists, physicists, natural scientists, and explorers of the cosmological universe. The most audacious scientific research, combined with more philosophical and literary fictions, has been consulted by the artist, who has assembled a library intended to enrich his own work.

Thus CASA aims, in the manner of certain works of the Renaissance, to produce a knowledge or, at the very least, a common mental and emotional space, a “sensory knowledge” which the viewer will have to seize in order to better experience (that is to say also decipher and understand) this contemporary graphic novel.

Emmanuel Latreille, former director of Frac Occitanie Montpellier, France, extract