Born in 1967 in the cosmopolitan city of Montreal, Éric Rico Michel is a photographer, graphic designer, and musician. Since the 1990s, he has concurrently worked in design studios, as a songwriter and guitar player with local groups, while pursuing creative projects in interactive arts and in photography. These seemingly separate paths eventually rub off on each other, trading influences, broadening the spectrum to form an experience that draws from both the rational and the creative side of the mind.
Rico has created a vector font for graphic arts magazine Rectangle (1987), published an album of original music with group Les Michels (1995), produced interactive 360° tours for Google Maps (2014), directed short film Midsummer Reverie (2017), and has participated in collective and solo art shows as a digital artist and as a photographer (2017–).
Déjà vu — Photography as a found image and readymade memory
“Déjà vu” is a brief experience during which time seems to have been put into a loop.
The moment takes place before our eyes, in present time, but it seems in every way identical to a memory, to an event that we have already experienced but whose origin we are nevertheless unable to clearly identify.
Science suggests that this phenomenon is due to a simple switching error in the cerebral cortex¹. But fortunately, the world is not limited to that of scientific knowledge; thus, I like to imagine that there exists a dimension parallel to ours, a world where the entirety of time and space can be simultaneously accessible in a non-linear way. Déjà vu would then only be a slippage between these two dimensions, a “glitch” of space-time which would temporarily give us access to this other chronology. Read
Can’t handle this — Close-up view of a bright green steel handle on a charred dumpster, in downtown Montreal, Quebec (2023).
Can’t handle this – Close-up view of a bright green steel handle on a charred dumpster, in downtown Montreal, Quebec. This color panoramic photograph was taken by Rico Michel in May of 2023.
Iron angel — Wide view of a crumpled piece of corrugated steel resembling a wing, in Montreal, Quebec (2023).
Iron angel – Wide view of a crumpled piece of corrugated steel resembling a wing, in Montreal, Quebec. This black and white panoramic photograph was taken by Rico Michel in March of 2023.
Sous ton manteau d’hermine — Close-up view of a bicycle wheel covered in fresh snow, in Chinatown, Montreal, Quebec (2023).
Sous ton manteau d’hermine – Close-up view of a bicycle wheel covered in fresh snow, in Chinatown, Montreal, Quebec. This black and white panoramic photograph was taken by Rico Michel in February of 2023.
A man who had seen me at work during one of my numerous photographic wanderings shared this fine observation: “You are photographing what we don’t see”
While reading “Memories of a dog”, I imagined myself as a japanese Kerouac, on the road with Daidō. We were trying to get lost in space-time, in search of this state where, deprived of our usual landmarks, we would come to confuse past, present, memory and imagination. Daidō was not nostalgic. He was not looking for a memorable image, but for the image of memory itself.
Landes — Wide view of shadows cast by scaffoldings on a green container, in Quartier des spectacles, Montreal, Quebec (2022).
Landes – Wide view of shadows cast by scaffoldings on a green container, in Quartier des spectacles, Montreal, Quebec. This color panoramic photograph was taken by Rico Michel in March of 2022.
