Quand Raynaud s’invite chez Prouvé

The article

In Art Critique, Laura Martin devotes a review to the exhibition that opens Galerie Nathan Chiche, housed in Vantoux in a school designed by Jean Prouvé in 1951. Her text proceeds in three stages: the architect, the artist, then their encounter.

She recalls Prouvé's career, from art metalworker to engineer and industrialist, his work with sheet steel and his membership of the Union des artistes modernes, and finds his vocabulary at Vantoux: panels pierced with portholes, a red portal frame, a building erected in two weeks. She then presents Jean-Pierre Raynaud's “psycho-objects” (flowerpots, ceramic tiles or road signs), which are distinguished from the ready-made by the artist's intimate relationship with them and which carry a threat in which collective memory and personal history intertwine.

She contrasts the builder who built his own house in Nancy with the artist who destroyed his own at La Celle-Saint-Cloud. In the first room, twelve two-seater desks by Prouvé serve as bases for twenty-four vanitas pieces: a Neolithic skull printed on a ceramic tile, highlighted with coloured plastic letters. In the second, hung on the porthole panels, the vanitas pieces play the curve of the skulls against the round windows, and the author sees in this an echo of Andy Warhol's electric chairs.

She reads in the title a reflection on lives whose outcome is written but which must be built with a schoolchild's patience, and notes that the gallery thus inaugurates a programme founded on pairs of artists.

Read the article on the Art Critique website ↗