Portrait of Renk, Le Muy, France, 2024.
© Loic Thébaud
Renk.
"Paper Cloud"
08.12.2023 – 09.02.2024
Galerie 75 Faubourg is delighted to present Paper Cloud, its second exhibition devoted to the artist Renk, in collaboration with Galerie Enrico Navarra.
In his creations, Renk subjugates space through writing and sign, through a formal language that unfolds in the pigments of his work. His gestures and his name which he constantly affixes, question the physicality of the literary landscapes created. They irremediably fill the void inherent in words, until they make way for the painting, skies and climatic instants that inhabit the artist and which he had decided would eventually eclipse scriptural space.
This all-over spray-on-canvas artistic practice had led him for his latest series to take his easel out of the studio and to the coast of Brittany. Since then, cloud masses have become his main pictorial preoccupation. He came across them in Arles, in search of a book for his son. This book, Le petit guide des nuages* (“The little guide of clouds”), exhaustively describes all the forms they can take, all the meanings they carry.
Since then, they have been the focus of all his attention. The subject, with its multiform nature, its hypersensitivity to light and its attributes, whether vaporous or condensed to the droplet, led the artist to search for a medium that would embody his artistic vision.
He opted for a paper made from crushed stone chips, whose resistance to liquids made it an ideal medium for this new series, both in terms of form and intention. When asked about his practice, Renk explains that he first draws on the paper with alcohol markers, still in his signature writing process, and then, stroke by stroke with a brush dipped in acetone, for greater evanescence, allowing the poetic nature of the support to emerge in the composition. Attenuating or fully reducing the paint’s concentration gives him more lightness, to blur, to fog, to the point of seeing a drop of water run down a window in a thunderstorm.
While Paper Cloud is part of the same passion for the beauty and complexity of natural elements, it offers visitors the opportunity to discover a different facet of the artist, a creative break that shows both the diversity of his artistic talents and the intimate, ethereal nature of the clouds that contemplate us.
* Le petit guide des nuages, Blandine Pluchet, 2020, First