![](https://www.klemms-berlin.com/content/uploads/2024/05/renaudregnery_charcoalpaintingbrain_2023-1.jpg?x83594)
Renaud Regnery
“My collaged paintings join these elementary practices together with the use of computer layering and modelling software to compound and challenge cultural references, associations, and signifiers seen through the lens of the digital age of ambiguity in which we live.” Renaud Regnery
About the artist
Renaud Regnerys’ works comprehend painting as a field full of tension, which on the one hand evokes the confrontation within the history of the medium and the discussion connected to it, and at the same time holds possibilities of (self-)assertion and allocation. Connected to this is his interest in dealing with inherited, social conventions, their aesthetic manifestations and psychological questions.
The starting point for Regnery‘s work is always a deliberate choice of a ‚grounding‘ material that he extracts form a mass-production context – i.e. wallpaper, wrapping- paper, off-products from various printing- and industrial processes. As a psychological and physical reaction to these ‚first imprints‘ – their specific patterns, aesthetics or materiality – Regnery builds the following layers of his paintings. Citing and digitally altering specific details or freely associating ornamental and ‚signal‘-style forms he constructs his canvases by an act of overpainting or -printing – destroying one pattern by establishing a new, authentic one.
The decision to use wallpaper as ‘material’, furthermore to use products from the 70’s up to now, highlights an interest that transcends the mere aesthetic aspect. ‘Wallpaper turns here into a signifier that defines an existence positioned between simple adornment of walls and expression of a certain aesthetic sense, a habitual preference. In that sense Regnery‘s paintings function as a performance of their own materiality and emergence, and are pictures and transitions at the same time. As such, they dock on to spaces beyond the visual surface, to social relations, to our everyday experiences and our affective habits of vision and desire.
“Joining interior (psychic) and exterior (collective) individuations the realm of the ‘private’ intersects with the impression of the mass product. Regnery considers each wallpaper to constitute a particularly useful representation of an established state of being that he then merges with others, such as scanned images of his fingers manipulating his iPhone.” R. Hobbs, 2013
Publications
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Fortune
ger./eng. Texts: Jens Asthoff, Robert Hobbs, Friederike Feldmann