Jean-Pierre Raynaud One on One
For Jean-Pierre Raynaud, living space and art space have always been one and the same thing and it is into this experience that his exhibitions invite us: an experience all the more profound because his works are radical. Hence this recent set of Targets and Shots, highway signs scored and pierced by high-calibre bullets, exhibited with a very thoughtful selection of older works, at the Galerie Strouk in Paris, in early 2021.
“[...] I took a trip around the Earth, I returned to where I was and I continue always to return to where I was. Like every author, I only want to perpetually return to the same places (1).”
Pier Paolo Pasolini
It is difficult to put one’s finger on the truth of an emotion. I felt emotion in the vast spaces of the CAPC in Bordeaux in 1993, where Jean-Louis Froment (2) had invited Jean-Pierre Raynaud to share an essential experience of our life through his own story—the fiercely individual story of a man born in 1939—straddling two centuries. This experience was that of “inhabiting”, which philosophers never stop examining or, even more, the experience of “home”, a reality both existential and metaphysical, a reality that is ordinary yet heir to one of the founding archetypes of our societies, that of the place (hut, apartment, house) which, sheltering us, protecting us, founds us and identifies us.
In Bordeaux everyone’s emotion was perceptible, because what was taking place there wasn’t the celebration of the human capacity to build, cover, overcome, to exercise a building power but, on the contrary, through an essential fragility, our freedom to break free of it, our infinite need to revive the vital impulse of breathing against it.
OPENING UP THE HOUSE
Raynaud in 1969 chose to design and build at La Celle-Saint-Cloud his own residence, with extreme care and intelligence: room after room, in an extraordinary geometric composition of white ceramic tiles, then the smallest unit of its identity. He inhabited this structure, which removed him from the aggressiveness of society and allowed him to live: an absolute made of rhythms, dazzling, kinetic forms of beauty.This place, of impressive perfection and balance, could have been his home “for life”, threatened by vanities, the immobile and the end. Isn’t a house a potential tomb? The emotion was strong, because he decided to destroy this masterpiece to, precisely, prevent death from winning, fossilizing it, thus joining Jewish or Hindu traditions. These teach us that when a house can close in on itself and become a sepulchre, it is necessary then to “open” it in order to allow it to be traversed by breath and light. Each year, during the Feast of Tabernacles, Jewish people uncover, materially, symbolically, their roofs, so that air may take possession of the walls. It is the same in certain Brahmin castes, who invite archers to come inside a building to shoot arrows that break tiles, letting wind and light enter. At CAPC over thirty years ago I remembered these ancestral stories, present in my memory as under the vault of the Lainé Warehouse. Raynaud who, in his debate with death and confinement, had decided to work with life, delivered us to the intensity of this reversal. He was already telling us that within the solitude he had chosen, he was profoundly close to the other. Maybe with us ... He “joined” us by physically destroying his house, “saving” it, establishing it in its spiritual dimension. Hindu legends reveal the secret of this choice, telling us this truth: “If I burn the house, it is saved; if I preserve it, it is lost.” Jean-Pierre Raynaud has always chosen the paradox, the step aside, a situation on the sidelines, a situation of voluntary “prisoner”, a game of chess with prohibitions, to, by pirating them, escape into the city or space. He thus saves the source of his home, the source of his presence by allowing his art to be similar to a living being. What engages him is not the social dimension of art, the gardener that he was conceives of its limits, but the proposal of experiences that allow us to get to know each other better, “me and another” would have said John Huston. If he is locked up, it is so as to, from his cloister, look, listen, wonder about this “all-other” that takes hold of him, surprises him beyond his territory.
RUE CAMPAGNE-PREMIÈRE
With his practice, which is the expression of his feelings, his thinking, his emotions within the interiority of his “strongholds”, he confronts us first with beauty, one form of absolute, and, in so doing, urges us, more necessarily than ever, to preserve the power of our fictions and our imagination. He res
ponds to our universe of commerce and compromise. Raynaud has always wanted the places he invents thanks to the expression of his “art”, as he wants today on Rue Campagne-Première, a place reserved for a privileged dialogue with his works. On Rue Campagne-Première, where he no longer lives, he organizes their presentations with breathtaking authenticity and perfection. Rue Campagne Première is neither an immutable site, nor a sacred stage.
Its formal aptness and strong mental impact, however, equal those of places such as those of Henri Matisse in Vence or Mark Rothko in Houston. It isn’t a chapel here, the works can change places, their relationship can change. It is a question of concentrating their expression thanks to an extraordinary composition in the space that no museum can match. Today, on this street in the 14th arrondissement, only an inquisitive, explorative pedestrian in Paris, thanks to a work glimpsed behind a tall glass window, could guess the existence of this secret place. It contains the last of Raynaud’s works. As in a short story by Edgar Allen Poe, I imagine the discovery of this “wonder” by a passerby pushing the door open.
They would discover there the latest series of No Entry signs, the identity of the painter and that of the world around him. No Entry signs obliterated by black crosses or vertical lines like the bars of a prison qualifying space. No Entry signs with bullet holes. One, two or three ... generating the feeling of a shock wave, crossing a “before and after”, an icon, deploying the space beyond the target. Immense No Entry signs, divided, cut like the cut-ups of Brion Gysin and William Burroughs, not to forget the gauges of Psycho
objects, which measure the enigmatic real and the hypothesis of a potential person.
TARGETS AND SHOTS
In this space Raynaud constitutes, to infinity, his vision of the world: true to himself, to his adventure that no word can define at the risk of betraying it. In 2020 he anchors, he deepens his position. He doesn’t want to let go of an obsessive dialogue with himself. He lives this story, “his story” every day more surprisingly, in this place holding at a distance the influence of societies and tribes. What he offers them is the reverse of their games, conventions and laws. This silent space is the place of his research. It is plastic, because it is expressed more than ever by an inseparably linked physical and cerebral practice. He designs his Targets and Shots which are, at the same time, objects of meditation, visions of the universe, territories of combat between himself and “the human condition”. These Targets and Shots are crossed out, abused or, on the contrary, extremely calm, in response to a possible danger. This place is inhabited by a voluntary prisoner in love with others to whom he addresses his works: “This is who I am. And you, who are you?”, on Rue Campagne-Première, in this remote place, he is indifferent to the spectacle of art and its vanities. Who is he? Who is this man who confides that if the end of the world came, he would leave with this red and white work signifying the forbidden, carrying this safe conduct in his arms like another himself.
(1) In Interviews (1949-1975) with Federico Rossi for the periodical Politica et territorio n° 3 1974. Delga, 2019. Translation by Maria Grazia Chiarcossi. (2) Founder and first director of CAPC.
Olivier Kaeppelin was notably Director of Plastic Arts at the Ministry of Culture, then Director of the Maeght Foundation. He is an exhibition curator, art critic and writer.