Finding interest in the difference between seeing and looking, and the way contemporary culture consumes images, Richard Heipp creates photographically and digitally mimetic paintings that intersect with themes of technology, vision, and artistic production. Coining the term ‘photocentric’ to describe his carefully crafted airbrushed paintings, Heipp intends for viewers to initially assume they are looking at digitally or mechanically reproduced images. “Then, only upon astute and close observation, is the true nature of the image revealed,” Heipp states, aiming to subvert assumed notions of craft, production, and perception. He believes this approach produces a profound change in the relationship between the viewer and the object. “I hope my work causes viewers to slow down and really look in order to see.” His most recent body of work from the Museum Studies Series confronts how the interpretation and consumption of artworks and artifacts are affected through layered visual or cultural systems of seeing, their institutional display and ultimately altered by Heipp’s translation into paintings.

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Hansen Mulford, Curator, Orlando Museum of Art, 2020