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Joël Richard is a French-born contemporary painter based in North Bondi, Sydney. Working with oil paints, he creates figurative and abstract expressionist works that explore human emotion.
Part 1.
Self-optimisation, cults, everything now, run clubs, curated lives, community groups, life coach, podcast and gurus.
This series comes from a simple observation on societal trends, the etiquette factor and belonging desire.
What Do You Want Me to Say Now is a figurative series of 15 portraits exploring what’s left once all the boxes are ticked.
These works look at the surface of modern achievement: do well, eat well, share it, “you are who you decide to be!” and question what comes next?
In this fast-paced lifestyle sits something quieter.
Doubt, fatigue, contradiction, emptiness.
Each portrait captures the moment between that performance and the truth. Faces carrying traces of ambition, pressure, and vulnerability showing the emotional residue of fast success and curated lives.
Rather than offering answers, the series sits with the discomfort.
Lies, masks, and the feeling that can remain even after we’ve “done everything right.”
This body of work is about that pause. The silence after achievement and the question that remains:
WHAT DO YOU WANT ME TO SAY NOW?
