Renaud Gilles

In Renaud Gilles’s exhibition FINISHED – UNFINISHED, we enter as one would enter a forest – waiting for an aesthetic experience and with the uncertainty of knowing the particularity of each tree. As these latest, each canvas as its own beauty, but it is the strength of altogether that truly affects the viewer. 

This is an exhibition of experience; the body and the senses are set in the heart of it. One need to wander in this forest. What one can see on the canvases are the marks of the painter’s gesture that engage the space of the painting into the space of the studio. In the gallery, with its light and its architecture, a cocoon is created, in order to contemplate, in the best conditions thoses canvases and to appreciate the changes of perception while the body is moving through and around the paintings.

The artworks exceed a bite more the size of a standard human being – encouraging a disturbing familiarity. They are slightly beyond one’s reach. Would it be more careful to watch them with a security distance? Or should we let our-self being wrap in this cloud of gesture and colours and hidden meanings. 

The paintings where the canvases are left brut to breath are quite striking, they become a naked background, letting free run to movement, revealing the dance of the painting onto the surface. May be the clearest illustration of the meaning of this exhibition is the tension between the finish and the unfinished, as we are faced to the presence of a living shape in full transformation and evolution, that bring one somewhere else.

Ana Iwataki, curatos of the exhibition