Renaud Jerez and David Douard

Renaud Jerez and David Douard

Work from Popular Mechanics at Valentin, Paris.

“Responding to an invitation from the Galerie Chez Valentin, the young French artist Renaud Jerez offers an exhibition of his recent works he chooses to confront the parts of another young artist, David Douard . “Popular Mechanics” is an opportunity for a third collaboration between the two artists. While evolving in parallel and individually, their respective universes remain intertwined. Sharing a common imaginary base that must in part to a long friendship, these two practices feed the same cultural and historical referents. So naturally, through formal and conceptual similarities, the two eyes meet, feeding each other, building a language that updates a common origin.

Taking roots from a collective mental geography, the works proposed by Renaud Jerez and David Douard build and agencent objects of doubt, cultivate and increase spreads references, drawing the eye in the direction of winding paths. Drawing its source in the latencies of the real practice is part of a form of mental and intuitive mesh that is embodied within hybrid devices and replaying codes display, painting, sculpture or the collage and video. Elaborated from a profusion of materials, objects or fragments of manufactured objects, texts, images, advertising posters, and organic raw materials, these works the register slip the most trivial low culture to the history of art and ideas, building a multifaceted language that strikes reality through different levels of representation. Not maintaining zero complex vis-à-vis benchmarks and codes they handle with a form of irreverence that often holds humor or irony, artistic gesture, and free radical, is akin to a form of ownership, extraction or possession of real as raw material, such as tank pure forms. Refusing the comfort of an attachment point of view, the work fled cumbersome theoretical foundations, opposing to a “mechanical” intuitive that cultivates doubt and ambiguity. This appears simple gesture that draws spontaneously in organs the most ordinary reality asserts its affiliation with Fluxus. Thus, in Jerez and David Renaud Douard work most often takes the assembly, arrangement of an abstract partition dread perfect agreement, preferring the relief of its dissonance. Proceeding by accumulation, assemblage, or otherwise extracted or simplification, the work is to be seen as a pure construct the matrix, the organizing principle, remain partially concealed, secret, see totally hidden. Promoting silences, ellipses or playing detours, the image is never direct, maintaining wandering and the rout of the beholder. Thus, if the sentence read mental trajectory of the artist, to break the “hidden meaning” of these works is that this arrangement is variable geometry, this grid of signs that can be turned freely. Malleable work in deployment reflects this interest both artists maintain for “liquid state” of thought, flow direction and passages that connect and reconcile apparently incompatible realities. This is when the resistance of the weld, which thus link “between” elements who order our visible world, the two artists are working here in question. To upset the seemingly inflexible reality, and to make this readable poetic arrangement, then the work involves the viewer a flexible look.” – Clara Guislain, Valentin