Paul Richards - New Paintings

This exhibition of new work will be Richards' seventh at Connaught Brown. The quest to give his subjects a striking, memorable image carries on in his painting, as does the sense of theatre and movement and an ironic consciousness of the role of artifice and fiction in art and perception. Richards' portraits and still lives, with their thick, shiny and lushly applied oils and their dramatic colour and vitality have a seductive appeal which befits their concern with human desire. This plays with the disintegration and chaos that his surfaces seem to threaten and the theme of the isolated and solitary being or object that he depicts.