INTERVIEW ANNE RENAUD

Interview

Oct. 1

When you paint, who's in charge: your hands or your head?

"I don't know, it's a kind of constant back and forth between the two.
There's the initial intention, which is sometimes just an intuition, a desire for certain colors or shapes, but I find that the hand, that is, the practice, forces you to slow down. It's a special time. I also don't want to know exactly what I'm going to paint, and I know that the painting will go through many stages and overlaps before it's finished.

There's a very delicate balance between what we know, the vocabulary we've developed over the years, and the attempt to do something new and be surprised. I try to recognize what I had in mind, but if it's too obvious, I erase or modify it. It's a very delicate ambiguity to find."

Painting "Bedroom Scene" by Nathan Harbonn (copy)

In the artist's studio (copy)

Which artists have changed your perception of art?

"The American painter Amy Sillman. She writes a lot and I discovered her texts and lectures before I even looked at her work. Her reflections on humor, improvisation, the body in painting, being a painting body, form...

Charline Von Heyl, for the great freedom her paintings exude. There's a joy and curiosity in her work that I find very satisfying.

I could name others, but these are two artists to whom I often return in my moments of doubt or blockage. Painting wasn't very present in France during my studies, and wasn't really encouraged, and I think that these kinds of pictorial practices made me feel at ease and really helped me to become a painter."

In your paintings, fruit often seems to take on a human form, or humans an inhuman form. How did you come to write this way?

I've always taken natural elements and landscapes as subjects, but after a while I got bored and wanted my paintings to be "inhabited", and that's when anthropomorphic elements arrived very gradually: signs of a human presence that disrupted my compositions a little, then fragments of bodies like fingers, nipples, toes, orifices...

I used to watch a lot of old cartoons, and I was fascinated by the grotesque and violent things that certain gags did to the characters' bodies. It's something I wanted to integrate into my paintings, at first as isolated elements grafted onto the natural elements, then as I zoomed in on the subject it gradually merged and we're in this permanent ambiguity between form and figure.

Recently, your paintings have become increasingly abstract, sometimes boiling down to two forms that coexist or blend in the reduced space of the canvas. What do these shapes mean to you?

These are body fragments or fruit, living, carnal things, but above all a conversation between figures. Fruit is a good pretext for bringing figures into conversation, perhaps in a desire to confront the portrait genre without tackling it head-on. It's easy to see a head, an eye, a buttock...

It's a way of slowing down to find the right balance of power between two forms.

I like the image of the wink, like a discreet, delicate movement in the midst of these more sculptural forms.

The fact that I've been working in a small space at home for the past few years has also undoubtedly pushed me towards these more domestic subjects, and towards still life in smaller, more intimate formats.

If you could live surrounded by any number of artworks, which would you choose to add to your collection and see every day?

A watercolor by Georgia O'Keeffe, from the Evening Star series. A landscape by Munch, "Moonlight" or a beach landscape. One or more engravings from Goya's "Los Caprichos" series. Caravaggio's "Boy Bitten by a Lizard", or "Medusa", or both. "The Wind" by Félix Vallotton. A painting by Huguette Caland, one of her body snatches. Helen Frankenthaler, "Cool Summer". A painting by Shirley Jaffe, one by Etel Adnan...