The long journey
The work of Michael Rieu, a walk through a forest of symbols, shows almost compulsive repetitive shapes without freezing in repetition. A sequence of snapshots, fragments of a life that allow a reconstruction of a story, the story of the artist. His drawings seem to reach the new, paradoxically thanks to infinite repetitions.

As a writer of shapes and colours the artist uses the elements of a visual sense, whose syntax is always renewing itself, to tell his story. Head, fish, the man closed, palette, ship, female, they appear as images from the subconscious, as signs of an inner or earlier life that through a series of visual echoes weave the continuity through the work. A woman, a man, a ship, often flee to a drawing, they become sculpture to finally appear again in another drawing, in a series of metamorphoses, stages which create a visual dynamic.

En reise i bilder og skulpturer - sidene 30-01-2014

(English, French, Norsk and Dutch)

Gunnar Skarpodde
Grafisk Partner
Kristiansand, Norway

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The colours that, according to the artist; "two new obstacles" after the forms, are reduced to a mosaic of grey-blue or pink. Some canvases or drawings are coloured with the brown – Earth tones. Sometimes white and black face opposite each other, but elsewhere collide orange, blue, yellow and red. Or the colours are covered by a haze of brush strokes.

A ship... an invitation to travel the Great Trip, maybe... – Haarlem... invitation to a nostalgic memory. Two opposite poles that ensoul the work, the work that is torn between the connection with the past and the constant need for innovation, the image of the birthplace and the opening to everything still yonder.

- Hélène Kelmachter
Attachée culturelle | Agregada cultural chez Ambassade de France | Institut Français d'Argentine