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13/1/2011

Renaud Regnery - Nicolas Moulin

Klemm's, Berlin

Renaud Regnery
Ritournelle

Renaud Regnerys’ works comprehend painting as a field full of tension, which on the one hand evokes the confrontation with 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. His way of working shifts between closed image cycles and quasi serially developed groups of work that are realized either in a merely painted manner or by using various printing techniques and painting materials. In addition, Regnery establishes a conscious confrontation with the specific presentation and perception patterns of painting by using architectural means, stillages or certain systems of hanging.

“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.

The presented works set their focus of interest on the ‘ornament’ – a term that has been one of the most disputed topoi in the beginning of the 20th century and has not lost since in its potential of conflict. Once conceived as a utopian idea of the harmonic relationship between the individual and society, it was soon to be picked up by the industry and turned into its opposite – produced by the thousands and stuck to the homely wall as ordinary, replaceable wallpaper. In his ‘wallpaper and silkscreen paintings’ Renaud Regnery is dealing exactly with this ambivalence. He isolates motifs, distances them from their origin by specific working processes and at last re-individualizes them by the painterly gesture. The mass product wall- paper and the serial production of the silkscreen becomes hazed by the subjective treatment with spray-paint and color application. Regnery consciously forces disparate layers together, blurs traces and discloses new spaces. Although the canvas is treated rather laminary and with a constraint flow, the works develop nevertheless a strong physical presence that embodies in its result likewise a critical questioning and categorical assertion of the painterly process.

In addition, Renaud Regnery has re-structured the gallery space via an architectural element that is conceived of as an in-between of inserted floor boards and over-dimensional podium. Constructed just a little higher than the usual step, the element changes the view of the individual works but also the impression of experiencing the whole exhibition. This form of presentation underlines the character of the single images, whereby each one claims its specific autarchy while hinting at the combined context at the same time.

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Nicolas Moulin
Interlichtengespenstereinzuladendarandenken

The urban and technological myths that have conditioned our societies since the age of the industrial revolution constitute the raw material of Nicolas Moulin’s work. A large part of his practice involves walking in the urban and peri-urban landscapes. His works are made through the active practice and critical observation of the landscape and its symptoms, territories that lend themselves to fascinating anachronisms and strange historical spirals. Nicolas’ work mixes the historical references of these landscapes with elements that are generically designated as ‘science fiction’.

Many of his works represent a kind of potential ‘response’ to our contemporary world, in which sarcasm and romanticism, fascination and horror exist side by side, in a peculiar balance. Our era, abandoned by better futures, seems to have got lost at night in a forest haunted by all the invisible elements that constitute the sources of its anxiety. This dystopia can be seen in all of Nicolas’ work, in which the science fiction that he claims as the culture of his generation no longer evokes a fairy-tale like futurism, but ‘a timeless present made of retroactive memories that generate, through hope or fear, the notion of “tomorrow”’. The disoriented chronologies of his landscapes evoke a vision of the future in which the spectator is confronted with a déjà vu never before seen, a really existing reality made in the image of the implanted memories of the replicants in Blade Runner, and reminding us of JG Ballard’s statement: ‘The role of the artist is now not so much to produce fictions in a world that is saturated with them, but to invent realities’.

Certain of his works, which I would describe as ‘para-photographic’, explore the notion of ‘fake’. They carefully erase the processes by which they were made, distancing themselves from the idea of a photographic image that re-transcribes, advancing instead the idea that the image quite simply is. This is the case with VIDERPARIS (2001), NOVOMOND (2000), PANCLIMNORM (2006) and, more recently, BLANKLUMDERMILQ (2009) and WENLUDERWIND (2009). Landscapes of futurist ‘vestiges’ or ‘false archives’ in black and white, devoted, according to the artist, to revealing a contemporary imaginary, in which – after ‘the future is now’, ‘too much future’ and ‘no future’ – the ‘No Present’ reigns.

It’s not difficult to understand, then, that Nicolas’ influences are eclectic and that he is careful not to inscribe his work in any recognisable artistic tendency. The child of radical Italian projects, Gordon Matta-Clark, German Romanticism, Russian Constructivism and the minimalists of the 1960s, he enjoys drawing improbable links between various movements and eras that seem to have little in common. This can lead him to refer ironically to the projects of Superstudio as ‘huge Sol Lewitts traversing German Romantic paintings’. He describes his position with regard to contemporary art as that of a vehicle orbiting the ring road of a major city: on the edge and always in search of no-man’s lands, where the hierarchy between disciplines, for example between art and architecture or indeed music (he has recently launched a label called GRAUTAG) collapses according to the same logic as the ‘sham’ and the co-existence of antinomies.

Thus, in his installations, in which images, volumes, video and sound exist side by side, the notion of veracity no longer constitutes the indispensable adjunct of reality, but leaves instead a place for potentiality. These digitally manipulated images, these volumes that separate the model from the sculpture, in GOLDBARRGOROD (2007),INTERLICHTENSTADT (2009) an NOCEBO (2010), for example, in which the scale cannot be determined, remind us of the ‘Automonument’ described by Rem Koolhaas in Delirious New York: ‘Beyond a certain critical mass each structure becomes a monument, or at least raises that expectation through its size alone, even if the sum or the nature of the individual activities it accommodates does not deserve a monumental expression.

This category of monument presents a radical, morally traumatic break with the conventions of symbolism: its physical manifestation does not represent an abstract ideal, an institution of exceptional importance, a three- dimensional, readable articulation of a social hierarchy, a memorial; it merely is itself and through sheer volume cannot avoid being a symbol - an empty one, available for meaning as a billboard is for advertisement’ (Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto For Manhattan, 1994). It is precisely this that we see in the omnipresent and worrying edifices that appear in Nicolas Moulin’s work. Not the architecture that we inhabit, but the architecture that inhabits us.
GB

Berlin/Paris

Nicolas Moulin Interlichtengespenstereinzuladendarandenken
Galerie chez Valentin @ Klemm's showroom 7d5e
01/14 – 01/29/201

Alexej Meschtschanow/Renaud Regnery
Attachment
Klemm's @ chez Valentin's showroom, Paris
01/28 – 02/12/2011

Image: Renaud Regnery

Opening: Friday, Januar 14th from 4 – 9 p.m.

Klemm's
Brunnenstrasse 7- Berlin
Hours: Tue–Sat 11 – 18 h
admission free

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