Today we talk about

Richard Slechta

Czechoslovak origins but 4th generation American, the artist works on light and with light by imprinting on flash sensitive paper that he manages with skill through gestures.

So gesture and light come together in “photographic” works that are not photographs but rather paintings that use a different medium.

The last exhibition in Naples – Italy last year entitled “Suspended on History” invited artists to recover an investigation into their cultural origins and to project it in both a contemporary and future dimension.

So Slechta recovered old letters from his great-grandfather who traveled from America to Czechoslovakia and vice versa and collected the most significant stamps by projecting their figures on sensitive paper through light.

In this way he gave life not only to a reconstruction of his personal past, but to an investigation into the customs of the agricultural society of the early 1900s and the
political society of the time that had freed itself from the chains and yokes of the oppression of the ‘Austro-Hungaric Empire.But above all giving life to abstract works with a dense and refined coloration that acquire intrinsic value in itself regardless of the historical investigation connected to them.

Richard Slechta has been to Naples – Italy with his works

His works

Growing up on a family farm, he had to look for creative ways to build objects with what was available from an early age. He graduated in Photography in 1995 in New York where he lived at the time and where he lived for 13 years working as a professional photographer and multimedia artist.

His work cycles show a special interest in vivid colors and shapes moved as by a kinetic energy through large spatial fields. The contrast between highly contrasted areas of color and fading areas express both physical and emotional instability conditions which embody the current human condition of living very well.

His technique