Buttes-Chaumont
by Joel Richard
Oil on wood panel, framed
20 x 25 cm

From the series What Do You Want Me to Say Now

Self-optimisation, run clubs, curated lives, life coaches, podcasts and gurus. Everyone is chasing the same thing: to belong, to do it right, to become who they’ve decided to be.

What Do You Want Me to Say Now is a series of figurative portraits by Joel Richard about what’s left once all the boxes are ticked. The works look at the surface of modern achievement (do well, eat well, share it) and ask what comes next.

Beneath that fast-paced surface sit doubt, fatigue, contradiction and emptiness. Each portrait catches the moment between the performance and the truth. The faces carry traces of ambition, pressure and vulnerability, the emotional residue of fast success and curated lives.

Rather than offering answers, the series sits with the discomfort: the lies, the masks, and the feeling that can linger even after we’ve “done everything right.”

#17 Batignoles Monceau is part of that pause, the silence after achievement and the question that remains.