Jean-Xavier Renaud

“Jean-Xavier Renaud’s generous and multi-facetted oeuvre informs an extremely extensive iconographic and stylistic field where the share allotted to sexuality is by no means the smallest element., with the artist adapting, here too, in a mimetic and reflecting perspective, to the hyper-consumption and banalization of the sexual and pornographic thing as hypertrophied by the new media. The Web and the world of video games, not forgetting comic strips, form in this respect primordial sources of inspiration for the artist. […]

The catalogue of Renaud’s works includes still lifes and landscapes, genre scenes and “portraits”, not forgetting rare abstract compositions. Depending on the case, the artist associates images and words.

The chord may be “serious”, especially in the landscapes, but usually involves wordplay, obscene ideas, appropriation and a schoolboy wit which evoke American neo-comedy, of the Ferrelly brothers and Will Ferrell ilk, and the excellent series Eastbound and down, where the world and the atmosphere call to mind the world according to Renaud, in many ways. A strange world where we meet a « butteur de patates » and Bernadette Soubirou, a « brame à poutre » and an enigmatic double salope on the rocks close to the scie. It’s absolutely idiotic and completely regressive. But it has the huge advantage of infecting our eye which really needed that.” [...]

Excerpt from Jean-Xavier Renaud. Infecter l’oeil, Erik Verhagen, Editions Galerie Françoise Besson, Lyon, 2011
Translated by Simon Pleasance, 2015