Raphaël Renaud: 1052 km

Geboren 1974, Studium an der Kunstakademie Paris.
Zahlreiche Einzel- und Gruppenausstellungen in Paris, Zürich, Moskau und New York sowie Messeteilnahmen in Brüssel, Berlin, London und Miami.
Renaud lebt und abreitet seit 2016 in Berlin und Frankreich.

If Raphaël Renaud’s paintings seem so familiar, it is because they are serenely extracted from life, a life that could be ours. Renaud’s art is deeply intimate; the reduced-size objects are at hand, and the landscapes appear as a déjà vu from our memories. Like many of us, Renaud takes pictures of his daily life with his cell phone, sometimes on the spot, sometimes staged, and it is by faithfully transposing it into painting that the shift of the gaze takes place, and that beauty emerges from the banal.

Light plays a major role in the works, creating the reflections dear to the Flemish painters, imparting body and substance to the things represented, and its softness gives the scenes an atmosphere of serenity. This atmosphere of calm is underlined by the simplicity of the subject, inviting to contemplation.

Renaud prefers the sensitivity of Valloton or Hammershoi to the neutrality or critical gaze of the hyperrealists. Very small format paintings on wood are quicker and more practical for an artist who lives between France and Germany. He materializes these snapshots into portable scenes, like fragments of memory that constitute a gallery that is both personal and shared. Whether in small still lifes, large landscapes or close-ups of interiors, the composition of the painting – here inspired by the method of framing in photography – is sometimes very frontal, sometimes off-center, thus favoring a change of viewpoint on reality. We then discover a phenomenological approach: through the increased attention paid to a lived experience, synthesized and aestheticized, the work of Raphaël Renaud testifies to a true awareness of the world.
(Colette Angeli)