JEAN-PIERRE RAYNAUD

The artwork that marks the beginning of his career is his house in La Celle Saint-Cloud built in 1969. Entirely covered with white tiles, he will live there for 24 years before destroying it. Its debris will be exhibited in surgical containers at the Musée d’Art Contemporain of Bordeaux.

His favorites themes are : pictograms, vases and white tiles with black joint. A giant gold vase, before being permanently installed at Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, has been exhibited in the heart of the Forbidden City in Beijing and suspended at the extremity of a crane above the building site of Potsdamer Platz, in Berlin. The Vietnamese, Soviet, Cuban and French flags also constitute a source of inspiration for him and a base to work on that gives a political dimension to his art. Jean-Pierre Raynaud counts among his realizations some artworks of monumental size. Among them, the stained-glass windows of the Noirlac Abbey, the Carte du Ciel (the sky map) inside the four patios of the Triumphal Arch at la Défense and a nuclear vault on a ceiling of the Museum of the Louvre. Jean-Pierre Raynaud, through the integrity of his work, remains a major player in the contemporary Art scene.

For this exhibition Jean-Pierre Raynaud presents ceramic tiles. But he surpasses its use as a construction material : he makes it appear as a print media. In fact, on this material, considered as cold and breakable, the artist prints a Neolithic skull which is associated with an object that is a symbol of the childhood.