Rico Michel

Author: Rico Michel

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–).

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The planet under the viaduct

The planet under the viaduct
La planète sous le viaduc

The planet under the viaduct – Panoramic night view of the skatepark under the Van Horne viaduct, in the Mile End neighborhood, Montreal, Quebec. This black and white panoramic photograph was taken by Rico Michel in September of 2024.

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Déjà vu, memory and photography

Déjà vu, memory and photography
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

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Iron angel

Iron angel
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.

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Sous ton manteau d’hermine

Sous ton manteau d’hermine
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.

© 2025 Rico Michel – All rights reserved