Excessive Sampling. In an easygoing manner, but not cynically, Renaud Jerez appropriates Modernist and avantgarde modes of depictions. He makes use of this anachronism to escape what is expected of a young artist, refusing to apply the recipes of contemporary art, on the one hand, and to develop a new style, on the other. With verve, Renaud Jerez produces a great number of small formats, which can be regarded as independent works. Although these are not preliminary sketches, the motifs are used again in large compositions, in which perspectives, signs, and different ways of painting are layered upon each other. In the continuous collection of found and invented visual materials—the picture within the picture, and the collision of styles—he does not strive for harmony and coherence. Taking the bull by the horns, he accepts the risk of destroying what functioned before. He mixes forms adopted from art history with appearances of the present: Dadaistic Citroën Chevrons, a Union Jack after Sol Lewitt, a Ninja Turtle after Baselitz, the »Fauves’« explosion in the video game »Doom«, miniature graffiti on the gray walls of Cubism.
»If I were a DJ, I would have 20 turntables and play them all at the same time.« He plays a nonchalant game that lets the themes exist beside each other, even if the result is disharmony. The identification with the sources means little and the transgression of existing categories becomes a productive strength. The satiation with more or less identifiable quotations liberates from references and permits a more subjective formal interpretation. The theme of Renaud Jerez’s painting is painting itself. Here, oil paint stands for its own excremental consistency; the powerful brushstroke and the dribbling glazes are like juices that digest a story of the pictures.
Renaud Jerez’s stance is reminiscent of movements back to the artist’s subjectivity that arose in the 1970s as a reaction to »serious« minimalist and conceptual art. It is refreshing to see how, in contrast to the tendency to comment current happenings in art, Renaud Jerez investigates the shapes of progress and their programmed obsolescence.
—Gabriel Samson
»If I were a DJ, I would have 20 turntables and play them all at the same time.« He plays a nonchalant game that lets the themes exist beside each other, even if the result is disharmony. The identification with the sources means little and the transgression of existing categories becomes a productive strength. The satiation with more or less identifiable quotations liberates from references and permits a more subjective formal interpretation. The theme of Renaud Jerez’s painting is painting itself. Here, oil paint stands for its own excremental consistency; the powerful brushstroke and the dribbling glazes are like juices that digest a story of the pictures.
Renaud Jerez’s stance is reminiscent of movements back to the artist’s subjectivity that arose in the 1970s as a reaction to »serious« minimalist and conceptual art. It is refreshing to see how, in contrast to the tendency to comment current happenings in art, Renaud Jerez investigates the shapes of progress and their programmed obsolescence.
—Gabriel Samson