Adventure of a Creation
Privilege of the artist, his work echoes his name.
We pronounce it and images arise in us, often the most suggestive of the work. No sooner do we say "Guy Renne" than the tormented Provence of Trees and Stones and the mysterious beauty of the Bathers' bodies sometimes accompanied by the Flames appear in our minds.
Guy Renne was born in 1925 in Moulins, in a bourgeois environment of peasant origin. Very young, his gifts for music and drawing are revealed, and, on the sidelines of secondary studies ill-suited to his sensitive, dreamy and imaginative mind, he discovers, during the happy days of the holidays, supreme refuge, Nature. He will be a Landscaper.
In 1938, a first exhibition in Clermont-Ferrand translated his dreams in the Bourbonnais countryside and testified to the astonishing qualities of designer and colorist in such a young adolescent: he was thirteen years old.
Shortly after, he discovered with fascination the universe of Museums, especially the Louvre. Major dazzling, in particular in front of Corots, Ruysdaël, the School of Barbizon - and Rembrandt.
At the end of the war, in 1944, a very short stint at the Beaux-Arts in Paris, of which he rejected academicism.
All his life, in his thought and in his work, rebellious to conformisms of all kinds, Guy Renne devoted himself to a free and solitary creation - even if it meant not making a real career ...
In 1952, he left his native Bourbonnais to settle in the region of Arles. Sketches, oils on paper or canvas mark his discovery of Provence, a colorful and picturesque Provence. (Cf. Guy Renne et la Provence , Th.Renne, La Galerie, Fontvieille, 1994.)
During a brief period at the end of the 1950s and through a personalized reading by Bernard Buffet, the "Trigonometric Venus" - unconscious and heralding prefiguration of the future "Bathers - as well as the Stations of the Cross of St Julien church were born. d 'Arles, following a state order.
Paysage avec reflets dans l'eau - huile sur contreplaqué - 38x48cm - 1937
L'Étang - huile sur toile - 66x81cm - 1940
In the 1960s, influenced among other contemporaries by Poliakov and especially Nicolas De Staël, he painted abstract works: numerous, groping and difficult searches between lyrical abstraction and geometric rigor.
Trends revealing his deep nature, one is expressed in his taste for architecture, the other in his love for the music which he will practice, by the violin, until the end of his life.
He finally adopts a resolutely geometric approach, stripped down, under the influence of Zen, by a desire to reject previous influences and by a spiritual quest.
These years of chaotic creation translate for Guy Renne a concern born of the reflection on the loss of spirituality in man, in society, in art - painting constituting, for him, a privileged means of spiritual experience.
At the end of 1968, a serious depressive crisis linked to the previous period suddenly interrupted his pictorial creation, which was fundamentally called into question.
A return to the observation of nature will allow him to get out of this impasse by reintegrating into the heart of the sensitive world.
Les Oliveuses - huile sur toile de jute épaisse - 54x42cm - 1953
Guy Renne à l'atelier de Fontvieille, en 1958, travaillant sur une Vénus Trigonométrique.
Pendant l'hiver 1968/1969 et plus tard, Guy Renne retourne donc "sur le motif" faire ce qu'il appellera ses "gammes d'humilité" : des croquis des Alpilles élaborés ensuite à l'atelier en de grands dessins à l'encre de Chine, à la plume ou au roseau, parfois sur fond léger d'impression ou de lavis colorés, sur le thème d'Arbres et Pierres.
L'observation attentive de la nature sauvage des paysages, humanisée des villages, lui révèle une organisation complexe des structures des arbres et des pierres. Il la traduira d'une main incorruptiblement sûre, gravant de façon incisive une Provence d'une beauté austère, fruit de son dialogue secret avec elle : un étonnant entrelacs d'arabesques en donne le chiffre.
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Le caractère souvent dramatique des arbres anthropomorphes inscrit l'humain au coeur du végétal, lequel fusionne paradoxalement avec les rochers, les maisons, les murets. Une statique et une dynamique conjointes insufflent souvent une vie organique aux pierres et minéralisent les arbres dans une sorte de symbiose, par une écriture personnelle devenue "langage". (Cf. « Arbres & Pierres, Du Champ moissonné au Cham exalté », Th. Renne, op. cit.)
Mais, Guy Renne le dira plus tard : c'est dans les courbes des feuillages, courbes toutes féminines, qu'il verra apparaître le corps des Baigneuses.
Le Val d'Enfer - encre de Chine - 50x65cm - 1979
L'Arbre Lyrique - encre de Chine, plume - 50x65cm - 1981
The first Bathers were born in 1970 in the form of oils on paper. Large horizontal bands of colored washes represent the earth, the water, the sky, followed by large compartmentalized areas, rhythmically arranged in musical chords: a free geometry transposes fields, hillsides, landscapes into a sort of “poetic geology”. On this light and colorful material, a continuous and serene graphic, in India ink, develops a feminine silhouette with voluptuous curves. The concerted use of an elegant design and a chromaticism creates an atmosphere of musicality that is both melodic and rhythmic.
However, it was not until 1977 that large Bathers were born. The graphics are then obtained "in hollow", by the primary background of the painting worked in superimpositions of light layers whose tonal richness produces a surprising effect of transparent material.
Until her death, the Bather, universal goddess with broad, maternal forms, mother goddess of mythologies, will inhabit her creator.
The continuous graphics will become discontinuous, alternating strength and finesse, to finally often fade away in the material which has become more vibrant, richer in combined effects of marbling, spots, spits: an energy of color never deployed with this intensity.
Baigneuse sculpture Solaire - huile sur papier - 65x50cm - 1979
Baigneuse Hammamet Aurore - huile sur toile - 116 x 89cm- 1979
Baigneuse Hammamet Couchant- huile sur toile - 116 x 89cm- 1980
We will be surprised that through so many successive works, Guy Renne has remained faithful to the Bather who has become as emblematic: transcended, the obsession will allow him to translate his evolving vision of the world, to the point of transparency. However, in 1987, during a winter of ice and tensions of all kinds, the radiant "Flames" hatch. They follow a period entitled “Fields”, where the compartmentalized background of the initial Baigneuses becomes an end in itself, evoking, in its rhythmic order, fields, vines, plowing, as seen from an airplane.
The Flames suddenly introduce into this arrangement a central form organized in elevation, by superimposed planes. Despite the ruptures, the Flame bursts forth and, irrepressibly, rises. What more obvious symbol of a spiritual order?
Finally from 1988 to 1990, a definitive fusion in oils on paper or on canvas, of the three privileged themes: Bathers, Flames, Trees and Stones, closes, so to speak, the work of Guy Renne.
At the same time, Guy Renne returns to the emotional sources of his childhood: the last pastels, mysterious, flamboyant, saturated with color, reinvent the landscapes of his youth which have become mental landscapes, dream landscapes. Guy Renne suddenly died in June 1990 - Solitary artist, in love with beauty, esthete singularly lost in the fury of the century.
Thérèse Renne.
Flamme tellurique - huile sur papier - 65x50cm - 1986