Paul Richards first came to prominence in the seventies for the satirical and subversive performance-based art he produced with Bruce MacLean in Nice Style, the World’s First Pose Band. The quest to give his subjects a striking, memorable image carries on in his painting, as too the sense of theatre and movement and an ironic consciousness of the role of artifice and fiction in art and perception.

Richards’ portraits and still lives, with their thick, shiny and lushly applied oils and their dramatic colour and vitality have a seductive appeal which befits their concern with human desire. This plays with the disintegration and chaos that his surfaces seem to threaten and the theme of the isolated and solitary being or object that he depicts.

People or objects, Richards interrogates his subjects and successfully captures and then recreates their essential matter or inner characteristic. It is in more recent years that he has turned his attention towards still-lives, but his inanimate objects take on a life of their own, re-invented by the artist during the course of painting. The portrait heads, for long now Richards’ primary subject, are charged with an emotional depth and complexity of extraordinary potency.