Exposition “Veins” d’Antoine Renard

Born in 1984 in Paris. Antoine Renard lives and works between Lourdes and Paris.

The artist is represented by the Nathalie Obadia gallery in Paris and Brussels.

antoinerenard.net

www.nathalieobadia.com

A graduate of the École Nationale Supérieure d'Art de Dijon in 2008, he was awarded the Occitanie prize by the Villa Médicis in 2019 and received a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris the same year, as well as the CNAP grant to support his artistic project. In this context, the artist made several research trips to the Peruvian Amazonian forest, in connection with the Centro Takiwasi in Tarapoto.

Antoine Renard has had major solo exhibitions including Psycho Botania, Cité des Sciences, Paris (France, 2022), Geometries of -l-o-v-e, Very, Berlin (Germany, 2019), Cats in the city, Komplot, Brussels (Belgium, 2018). In 2021, a solo exhibition at the CRAC in Sète was devoted to his research focusing on ritualised practices of perfume in Italy and Peru.

The Ateliers Vortex invited Antoine Renard to produce a new installation in their exhibition space.

"Antoine Renard is interested in memory, both physical, historical and olfactory.
During his residency at the Villa Médicis, he studied the ritualized practices of perfume in Rome and followed perfumeros healers in Peru. He makes each scent himself from plants that he macerates or from synthetic molecules. The propensity of perfume to evoke memories deepens this relationship with the truth of the model, to whom the artist thus restores a presence, an identity. This work on odours also testifies to the choice of nuance and pays tribute to the infinite complexity of a person, reduced, in his time, to caricature and silence.
For more than ten years, Antoine Renard has been developing a body of work in sculpture, installation and video, in which he invites what is in the shadows, lurking in the recesses of the subconscious, where he dismembers and exposes the mechanisms of fear and anxiety that sometimes irrigate our relationship with reality to the point of transgression. If he invites cutting-edge technologies and high-tech digital imagery, it is often to frelate them, to twist them in their use, to push the machine's potential for error and deviance to the limit.
Creating a porous environment where chemical, digital and psychic elements merge, the artist opens up avenues of dialogue between currents of thought that are dear to him, such as vegetalism, mystical theology, structuralism and scientific logic.

https://www.cnap.fr/antoine-renard-pharmakon