Jean-Pierre Raynaud - Jacques Villeglé: Jean-Pierre Raynaud "works 1966-1989", Jacques Villeglé "petits formats 1959-2002"

Galerie Nathalie Obadia is very pleased to welcome in Brussels an exceptional group of early works by Jean Pierre Raynaud born in 1939 in France.

Considered as one of the major artists of the international art scene, Jean Pierre Raynaud became known in the 60s with the series of Psycho-Objects. He has exhibited in the most important international institutions such as: The Stedelijk Museum, The Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels (1975), The Centre Pompidou, Paris (1979), The Hara Museum in Tokyo (1981), The Menil Collection, Houston (1983), Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1991), Centre international d'Art Contemporain, Montreal (1991).
In 1993, he represented France at the Venice Biennale.

His approach to sculpture is unique with a vocabulary that oscillates between life and death.
The cold distancing so characteristic of Jean Pierre Raynaud's work such as the tiles, the red pot or the coffins is very often contradicted by fragile objects like flowers and attractive colors like gold.

Jean Pierre Raynaud is attracted by the paradox between the crumbling clinical hygiene and the daily chaos. His vocabulary is significant of the obsession of death and emptiness: coffin, sterilizer, X-ray first aid station, stele, sterilization box, frosted... The use of primary colors is also a characteristic of his work as to mark the visual radicality.

Jean Pierre Raynaud expresses modernity with a wry sense of humor, he uses the language of the ready-made with an obsessive concern for aestheticism without ever entering into formal dogmatism. So while he is alive the series is not closed, the pots as well as the tiled works continue through the decades as a challenge to death.

Artists such as Jeff Koons and even more so Damien Hirst today continue this process towards formal and aesthetic perfection. They also have this clinical and humorous look that is a challenge to death.

For this event in Brussels, a major group of works from the 60s and 80s will be shown. This should show the relevance of Jean Pierre Raynaud's work to international contemporary art.

Jacques Villeglé, born in 1926 in Quimper, is one of the major artists of the contemporary art scene. His retrospective at the Musée national d'art moderne - Centre Pompidou - in Paris in 2008 showed the relevance and topicality of the work of this artist, who claims to be a "flâneur" of urbanity.

However, his paintings differ from the "ready made", even if Villeglé rarely or never intervenes in the posters he takes from the streets to mount on canvas.

His work consists rather in allowing the beauties hidden in the layers of paper torn by anonymous hands, who have sometimes also written on the posters or smeared them, to emerge from the urban chaos.

Villeglé's work is a memory of our "collective realities" as disseminated by urban space, whose history is restored to us through the singular history of its walls. One might speak of the "traceability" of the city, of everyday life today.

Villeglé's paintings reveal the extent to which our gaze is conditioned by this visual and everyday environment.

At the crossroads of historical movements such as the "New Realism", "Lettrism" and the "Situationist International", Villeglé's work, anchored in the present day, also influences many young artists.

The gallery is very pleased to show a group of small paintings, the first of which date from the late 1950s. The most recent are from 2002. They are archaeological traces, mostly from Paris.

These small formats show all the formal and visual power of a great painter.

Jacques Villeglé has exhibited in the greatest international museums, and his works are included in most public collections, including the Tate Gallery, the Centre Pompidou, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Moma in New York.