My paintings are figurative because I believe we are all deeply interested in people. But more so, people who live different experiences than we do. Their lives, of which we see only a facade, offer a kind of seductive mystery. I place my characters in these mysterious environments to evoke that feeling of wanting to know. It is a kind of chaos, the chaos of observing those unknown lives around us that promise better experiences than the ones we are living. A promise of more. More of whatever desires we are currently hoping to satisfy, and that sense of wanting more is what leads me to paint in what is termed Maximalism. Humankind is both beautiful and ugly, clean and dirty, and so I paint in oils—a greasy medium, but always on a clean canvas.
My paintings use symbolism to control that chaos and mould it into something that evokes a feeling of strange familiarity, a feeling of, “How do I know this place?”… “I remember when I used to love her”… “Why did you brake your promise?”. Deeply hidden within me is a nostalgia for that place, where all these devastating emotions are in actuality beautiful. I try to express that nostalgia in paintings of a realm I have never seen, for places I have never been, but only glimpsed in fleeting moments—the perfumed bed sheets of a Parisian boudoir, a ballet in Berlin, a circus in Budapest, and a sinking church in Venice full of scattered, broken stone cherubs. It is as though all these things exist in a place together, a miscellany that makes sense in another world.
My paintings are figurative because I believe we are all deeply interested in people. But more so, people who live different experiences than we do. Their lives, of which we see only a facade, offer a kind of seductive mystery. I place my characters in these mysterious environments to evoke that feeling of wanting to know. It is a kind of chaos, the chaos of observing those unknown lives around us that promise better experiences than the ones we are living. A promise of more. More of whatever desires we are currently hoping to satisfy, and that sense of wanting more is what leads me to paint in what is termed Maximalism. Humankind is both beautiful and ugly, clean and dirty, and so I paint in oils—a greasy medium, but always on a clean canvas.
My paintings use symbolism to control that chaos and mould it into something that evokes a feeling of strange familiarity, a feeling of, “How do I know this place?”… “I remember when I used to love her”… “Why did you brake your promise?”. Deeply hidden within me is a nostalgia for that place, where all these devastating emotions are in actuality beautiful. I try to express that nostalgia in paintings of a realm I have never seen, for places I have never been, but only glimpsed in fleeting moments—the perfumed bed sheets of a Parisian boudoir, a ballet in Berlin, a circus in Budapest, and a sinking church in Venice full of scattered, broken stone cherubs. It is as though all these things exist in a place together, a miscellany that makes sense in another world.
Robert Ricov
b. 1973 Sydney, Australia
BA 1992, TAFE NSW Design Centre Enmore
Robert Ricov has been living, working, and exhibiting in Croatia since he moved there in 2022. His oil paintings, in a style he refers to as “surreal maximalist realism”, use symbolism to represent such themes as the loss of innocence, betrayal, but also hope. He has chosen—as much as he is able—not to be influenced by other artists for fear of losing his view of the world in theirs. In October of 2023 Robert travelled to the island of Menorca, Spain, where he was mentored by Guillermo Lorca and Martin Wittfooth. It wasn’t until a few months after that he realised how profoundly this experience affected the direction of his work.
My paintings are figurative because I believe we are all deeply interested in people. But more so, people who live different experiences than we do. Their lives, of which we see only a facade, offer a kind of seductive mystery. I place my characters in these mysterious environments to evoke that feeling of wanting to know. It is a kind of chaos, the chaos of observing those unknown lives around us that promise better experiences than the ones we are living. A promise of more. More of whatever desires we are currently hoping to satisfy, and that sense of wanting more is what leads me to paint in what is termed Maximalism. Humankind is both beautiful and ugly, clean and dirty, and so I paint in oils—a greasy medium, but always on a clean canvas.
My paintings use symbolism to control that chaos and mould it into something that evokes a feeling of strange familiarity, a feeling of, “How do I know this place?”… “I remember when I used to love her”… “Why did you brake your promise?”. Deeply hidden within me is a nostalgia for that place, where all these devastating emotions are in actuality beautiful. I try to express that nostalgia in paintings of a realm I have never seen, for places I have never been, but only glimpsed in fleeting moments—the perfumed bed sheets of a Parisian boudoir, a ballet in Berlin, a circus in Budapest, and a sinking church in Venice full of scattered, broken stone cherubs. It is as though all these things exist in a place together, a miscellany that makes sense in another world.