"The American painter Richard Boike contemplates the Brazilian Northeast with the same heart-felt legitimacy as someone born and raised here. His paintings transmit and alert to pain with the emotion of one who knows how to feel and, above all, knows how to create. The regionalist stamp surpasses easy superficiality to emerse the onlooker in a universe of authentic language, where pain, silence and waiting blend together to form the soul of the abandoned and oppressed in their greater essence. As it is a theme shared by others, its sensitivity appeals to the universal.

I have compared Boike's work to Rivera's murals in Mexico, where fever, discomfort and outcries are eternalized. Richard Boike offers his paintings to the public with pictorial vigor and soulful fragility. In these paintings the artist speaks to the harmony between his work and the sensitive onlooker. Boike's paintings are of life itself, and this precious reference is what makes the artist deserving of all our applause."

Badida Campos, Artist/Proprietor of the Espaço Badida Gallery, Recife, PE, Brazil