Raoul Reynolds : une rétrospective

A name that clears your throat, catches your ear and ends up infiltrating your thoughts. If you have not heard of Raoul Reynolds, that comes as no surprise. In the shadows he remained, in silence. Raoul Reynolds was one whose many dark paths in life — despite ardent investigation — leave us with countless unanswered questions.

Raoul Reynolds was a pedlar, a confidence trickster, a camelot of art, a storybook character thumbing his nose at History with a capital H as it speeds unforgivingly by, retaining only its handful of chosen ones to blacken its pages and fill up our libraries. Here, we are offered another experience: change the angle and look at the margin. Artist, his default role, he used as a cover for his life of secrets while creating works of art as if they were gateways that would enable him to cross through time. He would be beaten at his own game though, while furiously creating pieces with enough impertinence to assimilate and crystallise myriad 20th century artistic movements. Alternately a surrealist and a minimalist, he would overcome stylistic barriers and wear the most unexpected masks. It was more particularly at the end of his life, though, during exile, that he let himself indulge totally, undistractedly in art.

Here is a retrospective path, a set of works attributed to him, a hypothetical stack where our certainties sometimes give way to doubts, and doubts give way to stories fuelled by our own fantasies.

The exhibition Raoul Reynolds: a retrospectivewas shown in 2016 at the Glasgow International festival in Scotland and at the Friche la Belle de Mai on the occasion of the Rentrée de l’Art Contemporain in Marseille.