Born to primary school teachers in a small village close to Domrémy, the birthplace of Joan of Arc, Henri Richelet spent his childhood and adolescence in the neighbouring small town of Neufchâteau (Vosges). After his Baccalauréat, he first attended the École des Beaux-Arts in Nancy, then the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-ArtsinParis. In 1968, Richelet was awarded the First Grand Prix of the Casa de Velázquez, Madrid in the etching category.[1]
He has been living in Paris since the seventies after having spent a few years in Quebec. He was married to the Chilean painter Ximena Armas.[2]
Besides his participation in group exhibitions since 1963, Richelet made numerous solo exhibitions between 1965 and 2007 in France, Quebec and Chile. He also regularly took part in several salons such as: Salon d'Automne, Salon de Mai, Salon Comparaisons, Salon Grands et jeunes d’aujourd’hui, Salon de Boulogne-Billancourt, Salon d'art contemporain de Montrouge, Salon Figuration critique.
Richelet's provocative humour made him choose gloomy colours. Following the tradition of Caravaggio, or of Georges de La Tour in his Saint Jérôme pénitent, he uses dark backgrounds to make livid and pallid flesh of tense, hunched up bodies stand out. ″Vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas,″ he was fond of reminding us. This apophthegm haunts many works of Richelet, where his obsession with sex and death is expressed by a parallel between impotence and incapacity to create. One can be surprised, in some of his canvases, by the warm vermilion of a drape, a borrowing which would not have been renounced by the two old masters he so admired.[4]
Energetic lines in Richelet's paintings, drawings, and etchings oddly bring corpses, broken and mutilated in their physical beauty, on the verge of death.
^* Delaunay, Jean-Marc (1994). Des palais en Espagne. L'École des hautes études hispaniques et la Casa de Velázquez au cœur des relations franco-espagnoles du XXe siècle (1898–1979) (in French). Madrid: Casa de Velázquez. ISBN84-86839-51-3.
