“You do not always need to be on a battlefield to come out of it annihilated. I was completely destroyed at the end of twenty-eight months of military service. One day, however, I went down to my garage and discovered in a corner some elements of my past, a few pots, a bag of cement, a pipe. There, in a very impulsive and incomprehensible gesture, I put cement into a pot — I concreted it — and then I covered it and daubed it with paint. At that moment I felt that I was discovering in myself something that set me free. I can say that I was born that day, in the end.”
Jean-Pierre Raynaud
Born on 20 April 1939 in Courbevoie. After training as a horticulturist, Jean-Pierre Raynaud became a visual artist at the beginning of the 1960s. Close to the Nouveaux Réalistes, he was interested in objects more for their psychic and intimate potential, choosing discarded materials gathered from suburban dumps. His first works contain the obsessive elements of his plastic vocabulary: the no-entry sign, the colours red and white, and the concreted flowerpot, painted red and marked with the number 3, which would become his fetish object.
