paintings engraver etchings gravures prints contemporary printmaker Renaud Allirand artist

In Renaud Allirand's Studio

Certain works of art look as though they've just been completed: they retain forever the freshness of their making. What can be said about William Turner's late canvases, Henri Michaux's ink drawings or Mark Rothko's paintings still holds true in Renaud Allirand's art, in his ink drawings, gouaches, paintings, prints and photographs.

The austerity of Renaud Allirand's work is at first striking. It's an art of essential geometry: lines, marks and colors come together to suggest resplendent silences and sublime ruptures, leaving them, I would say, the totality of the pictorial space. Lines, marks, "material letters", dream calligraphies and traces of colors contain or reveal what had been muted, but like a whisper, they sing the empty space.

Renaud Allirand's art is also about light and shadow – the shadow's source, as it's recounted in the mythic origins of painting. Remember that according to Pliny the Elder, painting had been invented by the daughter of Dibutades, a potter. Before her lover's depart on a long journey, she outlined his handsome profile on the wall of her house by candlelight, and then blackened in the contours (1). (Joseph-Benoît Suvée represents the scene in a painting from 1791). We could thus perhaps say of Renaud Allirand's ink drawings that they come into being afterwards, like the memory of a lost shadow, which then becomes, on canvas or paper, a cast shadow.

The artist creates a universe of unstable signs: in other words, he suggests rather than shows. A look at Renaud Allirand's writings leads us to think that his work initially sprang from a past frustration, a defiance felt early on when he was faced with verbal language. In his book-object Vivre (To Live), from 2003,  – which combines text and original etchings – he writes: "As a child, / I was persuaded that I had in my possession only a limited number of words to say, / for my whole life. / I saved them up to the point of no longer, or barely, being able to speak. / An hourglass of words: they meshed and resonated without echo. / From letters to words, the chrysalis died so quickly, / suffocated, suffocating… life was elsewhere."

Of course, to renounce "signifying" and "figurative" form and supposedly "immediate" words is to sometimes risk the confusion of nonsense and increased arbitrariness. It's easy, too easy! It also dangerously tempts the senselessness that's always hovering near the "informal". Yet the dance of the paintbrush, the drypoint needle or the pencil, moving along the thread of "abstraction" (a misnomer), brings structure to undetermined form and expands upon it. As pure gesture, the sign is no longer broken off from meaning, definition or univocity: it reveals itself in the process of unfurling.

"Life was elsewhere," wrote Renaud Allirand… It was and it no longer is. Life poured itself out in this "elsewhere" called forth and unceasingly explored in the work.

… Elsewhere: it resides in the free, ample and sensual signs drawn in ink; it resides in their lightness, in the multiplicity of their meanings, in their silent speech. I wrote "material letters" because the painter is a painter even when he writes poetry: words are treated as lines and marks. I wrote "dream calligraphies" because sometimes a strange utopian language, for which there is no dictionary or lexicon, appears in his works on paper (or in the ambiguous space of the picture plane). We may think that we recognize Roman, Greek, Arabic or Chinese characters, but it's pure coincidence, or an epiphany of letter and sign…

…Elsewhere: it resides in Renaud Allirand's gouaches that celebrate color in an "an-iconic" manner; they celebrate it as material, as pure joy of tactile material and texture. Looking at these reds, yellows and blues, all of these colors are both shimmering and dark; they surge up from the black. There remains something obscure and solemn about these works, as if it were difficult for light to penetrate them. But once the light does break through, it radiates out like light coming from a lighthouse, or like candlelight hastily cast upon an object. Light can also appear as an unexpected glimmer, like a rare and forgotten word used in a poem or a bird that suddenly flies across a foggy winter sky. Sometimes we'd like to reach across the glass frame to touch Renaud Allirand's gouaches and ink drawings, just as we'd like to touch the landscapes of John Constable or William Turner so that we could live there…

Couldn't we bring up here, without venturing towards synesthesia, the artist's love of music? The painter confides that he in fact often sings while he works. His song is perhaps secret, an intimate song of color that deafens the canvas.

The vibrant, dark and light fluidity specific to watercolor that Turner used to stunningly flood his oil paintings can still be seen in Renaud Allirand's prints and photographs. In his prints, whether he sketches strange silhouettes or landscapes that seem to emerge from a "faraway interior space", where nature is no longer imitated but signified and rediscovered through vivacious mark-making; whether he suggests the structure of a book (the binding, the pages and the cover) or the luminous rays of a comet, the metallic structure of a mysterious edifice (might it be an abandoned factory, a run down castle or the rigging of a forgotten vessel?), a roof with holes that opens up to a paper sky or a copper plate; whether the artist yet again calls forth shadow and fragility in his photographs (which could also be called skiagrams, or "shadow paintings", thus named after Apollodorus, an Athenian painter from the 5^th century B.C. and creator, with Zeuxis, of shadow pictures; he was known as the Skiagrapher for the quality of his work (3)); at last, whether in his works on paper the horizons of his colors fracture and articulate large flats of color which create these indescribable tones that Michel-Eugène Chevreul wrote about (4), Renaud Allirand gives the attentive spectator living remnants and the reminder – the echo ­– of an incessant presence.

Frédéric Tison

April 2012

Translation by Diana Quinby

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(1) "Dibutades, a potter from Sicyon, was the first to invent, in Corinth, the art of making portraits from the clay that he used for his pots. He owes his invention to his daughter: in love with a young man who was soon to leave on a long journey, she outlined the shadow of his face projected on to a wall by lamplight. Dibutades applied clay to the contours thus producing a portrait relief, which he fired with his other pots. It's said that this first ceramic portrait was kept in the Nymphaeum up until the destruction of Corinth by Mummius." Pliny the Elder, Natural History, Book XXXV, XLIII (12).  The present translator translated this English quotation from the French version of Natural History.

(2) Renaud Allirand, Vivre (2003).

(3) According to a tradition related by Plutarch in On the Glory of the Athenians.

(4) "Putting color on canvas does not only mean staining with this color everything that came into contact with the paintbrush. It also means coloring the surrounding space with its compliment. A red circle is thus surrounded by a faint green halo that progressively weakens the further away it is from the red. An orange circle is surrounded by a blue halo; a yellow circle is surrounded by a violet halo and vice versa." Michel-Eugène Chevreul, The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colours (1854 for the English version). The present translator translated this English quotation from De la Loi du contraste simultané des couleurs (1839).