I sometimes wonder if these
images aren’t dreams I made
in a moment of reverie.”
Éric Rico Michel
Born in 1967 in the cosmopolitan city of Montréal, Éric Rico Michel is a photographer, graphic designer, and musician. Since the 1990s, he has worked as a designer for advertising agencies, participated as a songwriter and guitar player in groups Les Michels and Bienvenue aux dames, and pursued creative projects in interactive arts and in photography.
These seemingly separate paths will nevertheless communicate, influence and complete each other. They will eventually merge into a broader stream that can equally draw from both the intuitive and the methodical side of the mind.
Éric Rico Michel learns the workings of media as diverse as programming, cinematography and music composition. He takes apart their mechanisms so as to understand their characteristics and bring out each media’s own specific voice. As in cooking, new ideas often arise out of a previously unthinkable combination of ingredients.
Since 2017, he pursues a creative research in photography, investigating modern-day mythologies and the role of the photographic image in the formation of identity. Identity is a personal myth, one that is progressively constructed through the appropriation of a multitude of characters. It is actualized through stagings in which the photographic image plays a central role.
The image today, if it is to be meaningful, must see beyond the hegemonic representations of the past century. It must acknowledge its own mechanisms, thereby letting the viewer in and opening itself to a wider conversation.
in brief
Éric Rico Michel has created a font for graphic arts fanzine Rectangle (1987), published an album of original music with Les Michels (1995), produced interactive environments for Google Maps (2014), directed the short film Midsummer Reverie (2017), and participated in collective and solo art exhibitions as a digital artist and as a photographer (2017–).