Jesse Richards- The Inescapable Mark

I make art to find the authentic presence in what society has discarded. In the forthcoming Heads series, and specifically in the Pierrot, the face becomes a site where biological struggle and transformation intersect. My work is a record of a body in constant negotiation. From the lifelong reality of spina bifida to the hand tremors following a stroke, these marks are weaponized as the technical surface of my practice. I use heavy oil pastels and paint sticks because they demand a physical resistance that mirrors the effort of the body to exist on the page. The tremor is not an obstacle. It is the mark itself.

I learned from many voices, some directly and some by study. From Francis Bacon, I carry the understanding of space as an enclosure for the expression of frailty in the human body. From Egon Schiele the understanding that distortion can reveal emotional truth. My palette is taken from a lineage of Symbolism and Expressionism, including the interiority of Munch and Redon and the devotional weight of Georges Rouault. Like Jawlensky or Schoenberg in The Red Gaze, I treat color as a vibration and a physical confrontation where meaning is rendered through emotion and instinct. Antonin Artaud’s conviction that performance must assault the nervous system rather than comfort it runs beneath all of my work — on canvas, on film, and on stage.

This commitment to the visceral is the foundation of a twenty-year trajectory. As a foundational voice in Stuckism and Remodernist Film, and through my work with Cine Foundation International, I have sought to reposition the role of interpretation in art. Analysis alone is insufficient when confronted with the interaction between the heart and the technical surface, a concept rooted in the thesis of Maya Deren. My direction of Hamlet and Look Back in Anger emerged from the same imperative — theatre not as literature illustrated but as living pressure applied directly to an audience.

My films, photographs, and directed performances are united with my other work by a single concern: the search for presence and the intensity within it. This lens was sharpened through a collaborative understanding of the inescapable mud, a wisdom shared by Béla Tarr during our work through CFI. He taught me that the rain, the wind, and the grinding endurance of the body are simply what time does to people. That refusal to look away informs my approach to every surface I work on, every face I turn a lens toward, and every audience I confront through the stage. The image, the frame, the performance — each becomes evidence that someone was here, that something was felt, that time has passed across a living surface.

Primal Expressionism is not a style. Not a movement.

It is tremors and scars. It is the unfolding of meaning over time. It is the only way I know to preserve what is otherwise left unseen.

I am a body that refuses to be quiet.