Eric Delom

Model RICE is a French artist who works primarily through painting. His work brings recognisable forms into play within images that nevertheless resist immediate interpretation. Tensions and contradictions are allowed to remain unresolved.

For Model RICE, seeing precedes creation. His way of looking is shaped as much by his engagement with art as by temperament and experience, by joy and disappointment, and by the unresolved questions one carries through life. To paint is to trust this way of seeing and to accept that it cannot be separated from the life that formed it.
 
Here, pareidolia is not so much a method as a receptiveness to what emerges. He does not begin with a predetermined image. Through action, gesture and sustained attention, he perceives a possibility and decides whether to pursue, alter or conceal it, or allow it to disappear.
 
He does not know in advance what he will make. A work is not so much finished as accepted: a moment comes when what has taken shape reaches its own equilibrium. Doubt remains. It does not invalidate the work; it opens the way to the next. In this sense, each painting takes its place within a continuum and subtly shifts the way those that came before it are seen.
 
Originality is not an aim...

He began painting in adolescence, encouraged by artists and other creative figures close to his family. His development as an artist has been largely self-directed, shaped by sustained engagement with museums and galleries. He also attended public evening classes in painting, printmaking and drawing at the Ateliers des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris.

His works are held in private collections in France, Germany, Belgium, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Japan, Nederland, Switzerland, Austria, Mexico...