David Renaud

Reworked geography maps, abandoned ‘skins’ of strange beings, abstract paintings with camouflage motifs: to find a common point in the different works by David Renaud we have to look at the copying process. There are close relationships between the works; the original use of maps is military and we know that one of the ‘arts of war’ deals with camouflage. Regardless of the form in which a world (military, artistic or the virtual world of science fiction) is being appropriated here, it is consistently about conquering territory. For the attentive viewer, each form has the same visual boobytraps and operates as a surface, a frontier between an object or a body and its immediate environment.

In David Renaud’s work, the idea of landscape would have gone from belonging exclusively to maps to abstract painting, then coming to rest in less noticeable but nevertheless more everyday forms, as indicated by particular elements (cabins, tables) or particular ́materials such as carpeting. The present-day relevance of the question of landscape can be found in this formal displacement.

Even so, while he has moved away from the representational worlds of science or art and overflowed into the real world, ‘landscape’ still always leads to the question of a point of view, i.e. tò the position of the individual in the world. Landscape is a mobile form, subject to genetic mutation, just like the ’skins’ of mutant beings or the evolving ‘Anthropomobiles’ forms that appear to have neither origin nor precise destination. In David Renaud’s work, this mutation serves as a metaphor for project-based artistic creation. By showing us the principle of displacement he is questioning the ends of art.