Cityscape in New York, 2025

Riccardo Mayr  

Riccardo Mayr is an Italian self-taught painter born in 1970 who lives and works in Geneva, Switzerland. From the very beginning during the nineties, he focused his attention on unusual materials as: iron oxides, rust, charcoal, ash, lead, chalk, sulfur, and mirror debris. The subjects of his paintings while remaining in the domain of classical painting as landscapes and portraits are primarily searching for reasons behind the pure act of painting and art performance, which has, in view of new technologies and their frequent use, become questionable. Capturing the essence of Time, Through Time, in Time, and Across Time. Riccardo Mayr's art involves a painting process that explores and integrates the realms of subjectivism with tangible aspects of reality and their physical behaviors.

The goal is to achieve a visual balance between personal memory and the collective memory of the world within the all-encompassing framework of physical laws.

This is accomplished by alchemically incorporating four influences onto the canvas: 

• Emotional influence: The emotional reaction of the artist throughout his personal life experiences, along with the related memories and associated feelings, ultimately shape the overall artist's perception of the world through the painting process, affecting how it is depicted on the canvas.

• Gravitational influence: In the painting process, gravity is acknowledged as a fundamental force. The role of gravity seeks to replicate its function in nature on the painting surface, allowing matter and particles to descend freely onto the canvas, unimpeded and merging on the painting surface in accordance with the laws of physics.

• Retro-causal influence: The foundation of the artwork, which acts as the catalyst for the images, consists of authentic collaged documents from the past. A simultaneous evolution of the image occurs both forward and backward through the painting process, as the artist interacts with the aged surface of the collaged documents.

• Entangled influence: An image emerges on the surface, characterized by two distinct and independent partially causal directions that advance both forward and backward. This indicates a painting model where all moments in time—past, present, and future—coexist within the artwork. The artist's memory, along with the collective memory of the world, shapes the image on the canvas in alignment with the laws of physics, encapsulating the essence of Time, Through Time, in Time, and Across Time, thereby painting the memory of Time.

Discipline of the matter – The art of Riccardo Mayr

Today, talking about creativity is tricky. Creativity has become strongly tied to the economics of the art market. It has become increasingly difficult to separate the creative process from the economic web within which an artist functions. Yet an artist may seek to express himself by distancing himself from the virtual dynamics of the market. For Riccardo Mayr, such a distancing process involves both an active pursuit of the physical essence of a subject as well as a rejection of its marginal or perhaps accidental attributes. How can the essential qualities of a subject be isolated and digested through the creative process? How can its countless elements be identified and selected in order to reveal the core of the subject? The creative act is not exclusively dictated by an artist's inner impulses but, rather, it must permit a responsiveness to an external physical logic. This process involves a shifting away from mechanical reproduction of standardized products (generally an unquestioned sign of competence towards a process that allows physical elements to mingle without restraint. Eschewing the use of metaphors, Riccardo Mayr is in search of the meaning concealed within physical planes of consistency (Deleuze, Guattari). He pursues this meaning through active physical involvement in the creative process. In focusing on physical nature, Mayr reasserts materialism as a means to reveal the essence of a subject. In this view, the material corresponds to the organic “"from electrons to cellular matter, to physical structures. These elements “"stripped of their synthetic layers, removed from their contexts and locations are free to coalesce in a silent dance in a new plane of consistency (Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus). Neither the motion of this dance nor its result can be predicted or replicated. The surface of the canvas becomes a stage for a construction process that demolishes matter only to let the particles recombine in new layers, thickening as a new plane of consistency, while still maintaining their essential character, a testimony of their previous nature. This style of painting lends itself best to the use of materials such as charcoal, rust, ash, shattered mirrors and scraps of paper. The past and the meanings of these materials are revealed on a surface that has gained depth, affirming their own presence, one which cannot be completely controlled. According to the laws of physics and in proportion to their own weight, materials fall onto the canvas, first melting and then gradually solidifying on the surface, where they emerge visible but not necessarily recognizable. In the end, the surface often having been the scene of reactive chemistry belies the complexity of the creative process.