Weekend Focus: Renaud Regnery
We are closing our first takeover week by Renaud Regnery with a special Weekend Focus on the artist’s practice. For images, please click the title above.
Regnery oftentimes presents his work in specially conceived displays, and adjusted architectoral and spatial settings (for images, please the click title above). Here some views from his solo exhibitions at the gallery: from Ritournelle in 2011, VietCong 2013, Tatem&Tobu 2016 and his recent solo booth logcabinfever at art berlin contemporary 2019. And enjoy a small selection of his newest work.
The visual concepts of Renaud Regnery’s current exhibition, (ndlr; Tatem und Tobu), seem familiar without our recognizing them: large format, monochromatic surfaces in pink with minimal, gestural touches, behind them strict grid paintings in various formats that reveal optical traces of the geometric and reminiscences of constructive modernist painting. What at first seems like an especially refined ensemble of the antagonists of abstract, conceptual painting in the very next moment develops into a cluster of references that goes beyond any semblance of an updating of painterly codes and conventions or a corresponding critique of them. (…)
In „Viet Cong“ Regnery challenges the possibilities of recognition and association in the viewer according to their own learned references, exploring idiosyncrasies through layers of subtraction and addition. Beginning with a foundation of culturally imbued wallpapers on canvas, Regnery develops a multidimensional critical strategy. (…)
„Ritournelle“ – the title of Renaud Regnery’s first solo exhibition at the gallery – alludes to the initially described ambivalences: this term originates from the Renaissance and Baroque period where it delineates a particularly catchy and continuously returning fragment of a melody and to which a certain timeless character is ascribed. Today’s French colloquial language, however, uses the term rather in the sense of ‚redundant‘, ‚well-known‘, or ’not very spectacular‘. The way the word ‚Ritournelle‘ is written and pronounced already points to the dimension of the exhibition with regards to content: the association to embellishment and curlicue is well-selected as hidden agenda. (…)