The body, concreting space

by Pierre SOUCHAUD
(créateur de la revue Artension)

There is certainly a battle of bodies in the paintings of Jean-Marie Renault

The artist sets the paintings on large canvasses, smaller settings would not be able to contain his gesture, his movement. Body to body the painter and the space: a completely free, unfocused and its chaotic place where the human body must still find room for its own construction build and concentrate on the vision of itself.

Did the recent taboo about figurative art which we went through in painting not in fact express the growing battle between concept and mechanism over sensitivity? Probably. And in Jean-Marie Renault's painting we can see the will to restore man to favour by the affirmation of his corporeality, his sensuality, his very much living and real substance.

The will to re-establish the feelings through bodiness, sensuality, true and living essence of the human being. With all the aspects of the painting, he literally embraces space operating a kind of fusion or fission with the highest energising degree of affective feelings.

The human body rises from this unison or this crystallisation, at the cross-roads of all the tensions, all the pulsions.

The birth or the apparition happens from and in the paint itself, that is to say, in the matter and the colour as close as possible to the meaning and to the immediate experience.

No preliminary stories. In and out, before and after at the same time. Then, there are spasms, strikes and this calming violence revealing the explosions of life and truth.

Claire Larrea

A propos des « Variations Tectoniques »

L’horizon démultiplié
Me projette aux antipodes
Et pourtant je reste bien
Dans le lieu présent
Un spectacle du monde se révèle
En premier lieu
Premier plan
C’est pour mieux se jouer de nous,
Car immédiatement, notre regard
Nous emmène plus loin encore plus loin
Ou plus haut
Et certainement
De l’autre coté de ce monde
J’aime ces lignes tropicales
Ces frontières indéfinies,
Strates sans sphères,
Milles feuilles de notre espace.
C’est une vision délicate
Du sentiment d’appartenance au monde,
Une vision de proximité mais aussi de globalité,
Une magie de l’ordre de l’ubiquité

In the work of art of this great painter, we can feel "strength". The strength of the sketch and of the drawing first.

The strength of the colours used side by side and show at the same time the motion of the represented subjects (primary colours magic…)

The strength of the motion is just beautiful; anatomically perfect! And the expression shows sensuality and energy.

The strength of the figures that are rhythmic enclosed in a world full of fusion within the cosmos, the primary energy. I believe that all of these caricatures this artist and give his compositions a living and touching originality.