Renaud Regnery

What Power Art Thou? is Renaud Regnery's fifth solo exhibition at Klemm's.

For the first time in Regnery's oeuvre, the large-scale and at times oversized paintings assembled in the exhibition dovetail almost classically oil-painted, pictorial elements with a painting ground that the artist himself commissioned and was then industrially produced. Regnery has sketch-like motifs, oversized details, pop references, and 'image-material' from tech-industry and advertising showing a beading effect collide with elements of a vernacular imagery: Witches, pigs and vampires populate the picture plane, rubbing shoulders, commenting and contrasting with their surroundings.

Regnery shows us an amalgamated visual world—multifaceted, gestural and resolutely direct, bold, catchy and resistant all at once—it questions our understanding of the contemporary world, its pictorial representation and painting itself.

Renaud Regnerys’ works comprehend painting as a field full of tension, which on the one hand evokes the confrontation within the history of the medium and the discussion connected to it, and at the same time holds possibilities of (self-)assertion and allocation. Connected to this is his interest in dealing with inherited, social conventions, their aesthetic manifestations and psychological questions.

The starting point for Regnery‘s work is always a deliberate choice of a ‚grounding‘ material that he extracts form a mass-production context—i.e. wallpaper, wrapping- paper, off-products from various printing- and industrial processes. As a psychological and physical reaction to these ‚first imprints‘—their specific patterns, aesthetics or materiality—Regnery builds the following layers of his paintings. Citing and digitally altering specific details or freely associating ornamental and ‚signal‘-style forms he constructs his canvases by an act of overpainting or overprinting—destroying one pattern by establishing a new, authentic one.

The decision to use wallpaper as ‘material’, furthermore to use products from the 70’s up to now, highlights an interest that transcends the mere aesthetic aspect. ‘Wallpaper turns here into a signifier that defines an existence positioned between simple adornment of walls and expression of a certain aesthetic sense, a habitual preference. In that sense Regnery‘s paintings function as a performance of their own materiality and emergence, and are pictures and transitions at the same time. As such, they dock on to spaces beyond the visual surface, to social relations, to our everyday experiences and our affective habits of vision and desire.