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THE TREES WON'T BE ANY LESS GREEN
THAN LAST SPRING
Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil exhibition
05.07 - 24.09.2023
Resident at the Académie de France in Rome in 2009-2010, visual artist Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil returns to the Villa Médicis to present his solo exhibition Les arbres ne seront pas moins verts qu'au printemps passé. This exhibition brings together three series: UNCOVER, begun by the artist during his year of residence in Rome; D'après nature, presented for the first time in its complete version; and Les Ambitieux, an original project created especially for the exhibition.
This solo show invites visitors to explore the work of Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil, where the gesture – whether of adding or removing – is always significant, and intertwines past and present.
Les arbres ne seront pas moins verts qu’au printemps passé unfolds in the Atelier Balthus, transformed for the occasion into a spatial antechamber with reflective walls.
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog published by Editions Naima with the support of the Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles and the Académie de France à Rome.
THE THREE SERIES
UNCOVER
Uncover is a series based on foreign magazines (Life Magazine, Il Borghese, Historia) from the 1950s to 1970s. The pages are hollowed out to reveal images “from within” on the cover, illustrating the magazine’s articles. On this new cover, where an image appears within an image, the elements form a coherent, legible composition.
Like an archaeological dig progressing towards more subterranean strata, this destruction / construction exhumes buried silhouettes to give birth to a hybrid image. One image does not erase the other: to exhume them is to take them out of their burial ground, but also to pull them out of oblivion. Uncover reveals the trace of events that never took place, of a moment that never existed.
AFTER NATURE
In this “D’après nature” series, the artist uses paintings and engravings from yesteryear to irreversibly superimpose an image of our contemporary reality. Thus, on an amateur painting of Notre-Dame de Paris, the artist adds (using the same technique – oil paint) the smoke from the cathedral fire that took place on April 15, 2019. Following the same principle, the smoke from the fire at the Lubrizol factory on September 26, 2019 is added in India ink to the old engraving depicting a view of Rouen.
As both events were widely covered by the media (including amateur-smartphone images), the artist was able to find images of the disasters made in the exact location where the original works were once created, enabling a perfect superposition of past and present.
LES AMBITIEUX
Les Ambitieux is a photographic series based on official portraits of men of state or power from contemporary history.
The photographed bodies of these “great men” are then cut in half and sucked out in the middle, depriving them of their faces – or even their egos. All that remains of this operation of subtraction is the envelope of function and the decorum of power.
The quest for power is hard work, and never a matter of chance. It also reveals an over-inflated ego.
Like the memento mori (“remember that you are mortal”) whispered by the slave to the Roman triumpher dressed in purple and crowned with laurel, Les Ambitieux radically erases the expression of this ego.
In partnership with
La galerie In Situ – Fabienne Leclerc, Paris
La galerie La patinoire Royale – Valérie Bach, Brussels
Practical information
Solo exhibition by Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil July 5 to September 24, 2023 In partnership with the In Situ galleries and La patinoire Royale
Visible in the course of the
Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil
Born in 1968, Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil lives and works between Paris and Rome. He is winner of the HSBC Prize for Photography (2004), winner of the Prix Meurice for contemporary art (2010), winner of the Le Prix 1% marché de l’art (2022) and former resident of the Villa Médicis (2010). His work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at institutions and museums in France and abroad (Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain de Nice, Espace de l’Art Concret de Mouans Sartoux, MACRO Testaccio de Rome, MAC VAL, Fondation Ricard, Palais de Tokyo, Fondation Caixa, Swiss Institute de New York…). His work can be found in major collections of contemporary art museums, foundations and private collections. He is represented in France by galerie In Situ – Fabienne Leclerc in Paris and in Belgium by galerie La patinoire Royale – Valérie Bach in Brussels.
