"One never recovers from one's childhood. That is why yesterday, today, tomorrow, here, there, elsewhere, in an obsessive round, the quays of Le Havre reappear in Richard's work. The mist of the Channel erases all reality, blurs the contours of these urban landscapes of ruins crushed by the breath of war or by the bankruptcy of industrial eras, gives birth to other forms, dreamlike ones. His numerous façade-sets, a kind of signature, are in the image of those left standing in the rubble fields of bombed cities. This endless confrontation with his past leads him to invent a pictorial language, declined first in black and grey, then in colour, in an infinite stylistic variety of space-times, formats and supports. Richard seizes these interstices that separate the worlds of reality and imagination. The sea is never absent, not for its distances, but so that the moon or the sun may rise there, that night or sea birds may fly there, that boats may sail there. The human has little or no place in these dreams traced in graphite, sometimes underlined with a touch of colour, dawn or dusk. They are always small silhouettes, 'little men', sorts of undersized tightrope-walking commas. Perhaps the reflection of the artist who will say, after the shock of Patrice Chéreau's death, 'I have lost my balancing pole'. The artist as a tightrope walker, the definition is tempting." Extract from the text by Martine Kahane.