In October, Strouk Gallery presents a new exhibition by artists Jean Pierre Raynaud and Robert Combas, centered on the material Paint.

 

Why did these two want to show their works in resonance? Perhaps to write in painting a sort of manifesto for art and love.

"Where Robert Combas opens his body to reveal painting, Jean Pierre Raynaud closes his eyes to see it”. 

 

 

 

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On the one hand, Robert Combas, born in 1957, influenced by folk art, Pop art, comics, rock and advertising. Right from the start of his career, he broke away from the conceptual movements of the 1970s to return to a real, insolent, impulsive, combative painting, almost expressionist and full of critical humor.

 

On the other hand, Jean Pierre Raynaud, born in 1939, has been obsessively using motifs and objects linked to his own history since the early 1960s, reappropriating them and giving them a formal value, while intervening slightly to give them their full meaning. For example, 15cm square white ceramic tiles with black grout covering sculptures, shipping containers and architecture; stainless steel medical containers filled with the rubble from a house that was completely tiled and then destroyed; Psycho-object flowerpots of all sizes filled with cement and painted in bright colors; or no-entry traffic signs.

 

By choosing to display these two artists in resonance, Strouk Gallery - over and above a search for correspondences or discordances between their highly singular works - allows us to observe the repercussions of one sensibility on another, and vice versa.

This unique exhibition, with its historical and museum qualities, confirms the gallery's strong commitment and support for these two artists, year after year. 

 

 

"What we bring is paint," says Jean Pierre Raynaud.

 

Robert Combas and Jean Pierre Raynaud both work with the same material: paint.

For Jean Pierre Raynaud, it is singular in its programmatic nature; for Robert Combas, it is plural in the infinite variety of its manifestations.

In works designed between 2007 and 2009, Raynaud summons up and declines the hallucinatory power of the commodity "paint" and its brands: Avi, Ripolin, Corona, Novémail, Renaulac, Nitrolac... displayed like magnetic and colored billboards in the darkness of the advertising and consumerist world. 

In his own words, “I gave myself the experience of painting! For three years, I met painting”.

It's this experience that allows him today to meet Combas, who, in his impulsive and physical relationship with painting, constantly enters into hallucination itself, and lets us experience, through his works, his uncommon perceptions and sensations. 

Jean Pierre Raynaud sees Combas's painting as a pleasure that escapes from the tube, a sensuality that comes straight out of the body, where he describes himself as being in "rectitude", having "closed my eyes to see the painting".

Robert Combas opens his body to let the paint emerge, while Jean Pierre Raynaud closes his eyes to see it.

 

Why did these two want to show their work together? Perhaps to write a kind of manifesto of love in paint.

These are two ways of approaching painting, two long-trained artists who have no desire to influence each other. Each has his own work, while respecting the other's talent. "We bring two worlds that are not mutually exclusive. It's like loving the sea and the mountains, or the North side and the South side. Painting brings us together, it's depth that unites us", says Jean Pierre Raynaud.

 

The depth of the sea or the height of the mountain, these two vertical measurements meet in the mirror of the horizon. 

 

Two worlds look at each other in an incongruous mirror: that of the conceptual Jean Pierre Raynaud, speaking to us of introspection in this painting that empties itself of all painting; that of the knight Robert Combas, speaking to us of instinct and conquest in these paintings that overflow with paint.

 

Jean Pierre Raynaud's work is a manifesto. His works offer the viewer the principles of a lived morality. So it is with contemplation. 

With Robert Combas, conversely, the work is a combat. His productions offer the viewer the principles of a lived battle. And the same goes with effervescence.

 

Robert Combas, Jean Pierre Raynaud, both art-historical features. Neither seeks to situate himself in a general, contemporary history, but rather to interrogate a history from the depths of time. Both set their own pendulum in motion, navigating from their inner cells to the outside world, and vice versa. 

With Robert Combas, the cell of the canvas surface encloses profusion. As with Jean Pierre Raynaud, where the architectural cell is covered with thousands of white ceramic tiles (the house, the mastaba), his paint pots, empty and inverted, display their colored lids like signs or totems to be idolized. 

With Jean Pierre Raynaud, the infinite expansion of psycho-objects can invade any space. As with Robert Combas, the infinite expansion of mental space manifests itself in the fabulous crumbling of his subjectivity.

    

Ultimately, something very powerful unites these two ways of being: the union of death and life, both present as much in the contemplation of the one as in the struggle of the other. Death stands at the heart of life, at the heart of creation. It is this dialectical tension between life and death, between creation and vanity, that makes Robert Combas and Jean Pierre Raynaud stand at the solid point of contact of two instincts as profound as they are enigmatic.

 

Kristell Loquet (with Jean Pierre Raynaud)