After years of figurative and academic painting, Marcel Reynaud has turned towards lyrical abstraction. This art is difficult and the conquest of blank spaces can only succeed with a sensitive soul who knows how to dominate his palette with spontaneity. This is a natural thing for him as he makes his own pictorial material.
“I have always believed, he says, that within any chaos, there is rebirth and I have very great confidence in life and in its hidden energy.” Rarely has such disorder engendered such sensitive harmony given that the force of his painting stems from its authenticity. “I arrive at a stage where I am no longer afraid of losing something”, states Marcel Reynaud who is not searching for the aesthetic aspect of painting. If his works are so beautiful, it is because of his joyful and optimistic nature and, therefore, it is an aesthetic in the background.
The canvasses define nothing and it took him some time before his compositions freed themselves of any surrealist presence. And when this is still the case, he is annoyed. He recognizes that “Surrealism has one foot in the mental process while wanting to remove it. So I say to myself that Surrealism is perhaps a necessary means to achieving Abstraction.”
Reynaud’s gestures demonstrate a perfect knowledge of how to fill space but also of the art of drawing and composition. He is even more successful in this endeavor as he paints without any spirit of confrontation with the great Abstract movements of the 20th century. Yet a different kind of ambience is created in his compositions.
He refers only to those who have known how to bring freedom and fantasy to composition; Pollock, Gerhard Richter, Franz Kline, Ad Reinhardt, Bradley Walker Tomlin, Sam Francis, Robert Motherwell, Joan Mitchell and Willem De Kooning.
Exhibitions
1983 Galerie B.M.C, Paris
2001 Musée d’Art Moderne de Troyes
2003 Rencontres Culturelles France/Georgia, French Embassy, Georgia
2012 Galerie S.B.K, Lyon
2013 “Peintures”, Association Athéna, Sarlat la-Canéda
2013 “Écritures Contemporaines, peintures et sculptures”, Domme
2014 Centre culturel André Malraux, Tarare