David Renaud

Born in 1965 in Grenoble (FR). Lives and works in Paris (FR)

Les Îles

2014
9 Acrylic paints and graphite on paper : Inexpressible, Possession, Defiance, Desolation, Deception, Disappointment, Promise, Unexpected
65 x 50 cm chaque
Year of Purchase: 2015

David Renaud is drawn to topographic maps both for their visual qualities and for their capacity to stir the imagination. His interest in maps ties back to his attraction to camouflage, seen as abstraction and as a form of landscape representation: both are military in origin and evoke appropriation of territory. The artist focuses on the uses maps, what they represent, and the reasons why one chooses to chart one area rather than another. A detail on a map, a place name, or a dominant color is a point of departure for his visual experiments. He began by painting over maps and enhancing them with ink, then gradually removing the legends. When he uses cartographic codes, detaching them from their context to create artworks, paintings, sculptures, and in situ installations, he highlights the traits of the represented territory. His works raise questions of language, symbolism, and sensibility. They invite viewers to position themselves within, in front of, and outside the map. The artist thus questions the pleasure of projecting oneself into a map and visualizing a landscape. Maps of islands appeal to him precisely because of the empty space they contain; they led him to experiment with playful combinations between cartographic codes and pictorial techniques. Gradually, the map as such seems to disappear.

With Islands, 2014 — Inexpressible, Possession, Defiance, Desolation, Deception, Disappointment, Promise, Unexpected, David Renaud takes the idea of a minimal map even further. Featured in the exhibition Zones Sensibles (July 24–October 23, 2016) alongside his cartographic maps, each of his paintings in different shades of grey presents geographic coordinates of an island. What was a navigation tool is now replaced by the shape of a territory. And like the penciled legend below, the name of the island evokes a sensation. The place name refers to the desire for an elsewhere. In the Series of 8 Maps of Islands, the artist explores the evocative power of names inscribed on a map. The work invites the viewer to inquire about the way a map fragment, a trace, may stand for a map. The work further opens up research into new color scales. A shift takes place, and color takes over and comes to symbolize a territory.

^{Pauline Lisowski}