about

I work in many mediums. Maybe too many. I never feel satisfied and am always searching. I am a devotee of intensity; on a hunt I can’t quite name.

Across painting, film, photography, and theater, I keep returning to the same territory: damaged bodies, mortality and transformation, dream states, raw vulnerability. People treated as grotesque, excessive, obsolete, or undesirable. Beauty that survives degradation rather than escaping it.

I think I am finding myself in all of those things. -J

Jesse Richards: Primal Expressionism & Remodernist Cinema

Jesse Richards is an American painter, filmmaker, photographer, and theater artist whose work spans Expressionism, underground cinema, and Remodernist aesthetics.

Described as “one of the most provocative names in American underground culture” and “the father of Remodernist cinema,” Richards emerged from the international Stuckism movement in the early 2000s while developing a body of work centered on emotional immediacy, material roughness, and the rejection of postmodern irony.

His practice moves between painting, film, photography, and performance, linking underground film history, expressionist draftsmanship, and body-based mark-making into a singular interdisciplinary language.

Critics and historians of underground culture have situated his work within a lineage that connects Stuckism and spiritually rigorous cinema to the raw gestural traditions of Expressionism; linking the psychological distortion of masters like Munch and Schiele to the cinematic philosophies associated with Béla Tarr and Fred Kelemen.

In his painting practice, Richards works in heavy oil pastels and paint sticks, Richards treats the painted surface as a site of biological and emotional confrontation; raw, resistive, layered, and deliberately unresolved. Developed through a practice shaped in part by physical limitation, neurological injury, and tremor, his visual language transforms instability into material force.

His forthcoming Heads series draws from the psychic distortion of Edvard Munch, the spatial enclosure of Francis Bacon, and the emotional distortion of Egon Schiele, while incorporating the physical immediacy of pre-war aesthetic traditions and the emotional intensity of Die Brücke Expressionism.

Richards describes this evolving approach as “Primal Expressionism,” a practice rooted in emotional exposure, anti-ironic sincerity, and the refusal of polished detachment.

A foundational voice within the Stuckism movement, Richards participated in several landmark exhibitions, including The Stuckists Punk Victorian at the Walker Art Gallery during the Liverpool Biennial, Addressing the Shadow and Making Friends with Wild Dogs: Remodernism at CB’s 313 Gallery in New York, and THE Triumph of Stuckism at the 2006 Liverpool Biennial.

Richards is also recognized as the primary architect of Remodernist cinema and author of the Remodernist Film Manifesto, which called for filmmaking that is “more personal, more risky” in opposition to the emotional detachment of contemporary cinema.

In an interview with iNews (Bulgaria), Richards noted: “A Remodernist film and its director risk everything in their attempt to share something real or true… A mainstream film would never take those risks”.

He co-directed Shooting at the Moon (2003) with Nicholas Watson, which screened during FLIXATION at The Horse Hospital in London, a venue historically associated with avant-garde film and performance.

Richards also co-produced the collaborative feature In Passing with Peter Rinaldi, an early realization of Remodernist principles utilizing Super-8, flip video, and DSLR footage. In shaping the production as a collective statement, Richards intentionally excluded a directorial segment of his own in order to prioritize the movement’s broader voice over individual authorship.

His work and ideas were the subject of The New Personal Cinema, a critical essay by Jack Sargeant—historian of underground culture and author of Deathtripping: The Definitive History of the Cinema of Transgression—published in FilmInk. This cinematic lineage is further reinforced by Richards' alignment with the "internal movement" of the soul described by director Fred Kelemen (Fate, Frost), a long-time collaborator of Béla Tarr.

Before his work in film and painting, Richards directed stage productions including Hamlet (1996) and John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1998) for The New Haven Theatre Company, connecting his early work to traditions of postwar theatrical dissent, as well as being informed by Antonin Artaud’s principles of visceral confrontation. His pinhole photography has appeared alongside work by Billy Childish and Wolf Howard in Dark Chamber (Urban Fox Press, 2007).

Writing in Sofia Live, critic Mariana Hristova described Richards’ films as “minimalist to the bone… rough at first glance, but nevertheless poetic”.

Across painting, cinema, photography, and theater arts, Richards’ work remains committed to emotional exposure and the search for what survives beneath cultural irony and spectacle.

Richards currently lives and works in Massachusetts and Connecticut.