Press kit

Jean Pierre RaynaudQue chacun enchante sa prison 12.07.2019 — 22.09.2019

On the cover:

Jean Pierre Raynaud, La Maison [The House], 1969-1993. Collection of the CAPC musée d’art

contemporain de Bordeaux and Linda & Guy Pieters, Belgium. Off-site exhibition Que chacun

enchante sa prison, installation view at the Grand-Théâtre, Bordeaux, 12 July - 1er September 2019.

©Adagp, Paris, 2019. Photo: Frédéric Deval / mairie de Bordeaux.

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GENERALINFORMATION

EXHIBITION

Jean Pierre RaynaudQue chacun enchante sa prison12.07.2019 – 22.09.2019

Off-site exhibition:Grand-Théâtre de Bordeauxfrom 12 July to 1st September 2019Espace Saint-Rémi, Jardin Botanique and CAPCfrom 12 July to 22 September 2019

CURATOR

Anne Cadenet

INAUGURATION

Thursday 11 July 2019, in the presence of the artist

2.30pm: Jardin Botanique 3.30 pm: Batcub, departure ponton Stalingrad, arrival ponton Quinconces at 3.37

4.00pm: CAPC, Talk between Jean Pierre Raynaud and Anne Cadenet, curator6.00pm: Espace Saint-Rémi6.30pm: Grand-Théâtre

As part of the cultural season Liberté ! Bordeaux 2019

The CAPC would like to thank Linda and Guy Pieters for their loan, the Pro-Mousse company for its support during the restoration of the Manifeste installation, and the teams of the Grand-Théâtre, the Jardin Botanique, and the Espace Saint-Rémi for their invaluable assistance.Thanks also to the whole team at the CAPC Bordeaux Museum of Contemporary Art, particularly the technical department, the collection, mediation, and communication centres, and finally to interns Victoria Tabusso and Mathilde Brière, supervised by Valérie Lantignac and Milena Paez Barbat.

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Jean Pierre Raynaud, Pot 815, 1968. Collection of CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux

Off-site exhibition Que chacun enchante sa prison, installation view at Jardin Botanique, Bordeaux

(12 July – 22 September 2019). © Adagp, Paris, 2019

Photo: Frédéric Deval / mairie de Bordeaux

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PRESS RELEASE

Traduit du français par Kelly Smith

Jean-Pierre RaynaudQue chacun enchante sa prison

L’Art à perpétuité [Art for Life], a collection of aphorisms published by Jean Pierre Raynaud in 2017, is a good illustration of this artist’s paradoxical relationship to the notion of freedom: a notion he sees as lying somewhere between vocation and coercion, commitment and imprisonment. A good example of this is La Maison [The House], the ever-evolving house in La Celle Saint-Cloud near Paris which the artist designed, and in which he lived from 1969. Nevertheless, he would later “liberate” the house from its old form, and give it a new one: namely, a thousand surgical steel containers with the remnants of the building, which were exhibited in 1993 in the nave of the CAPC in Bordeaux. Indeed, a large number of these containers are currently being reexhibited by the artist, beneath William Bouguereau’s painted ceilings in the sumptuous Salon Boireau at the Grand-Théâtre in Bordeaux. In the Salon Lalande, there will be a screening of La Maison [The House], the 1993 film in which Michelle Porte documented this singular project.

Rarely exhibited in France, the installation Manifeste [Manifest] (1984) is composed of impeccably aligned rows of beds made up with spotless white sheets, each with a white canvas intersected with fine black lines hung above it. This installation will find a setting particularly conducive to queries on life, liberty, and art – queries which beset the artist’s entire body of work – in the nave of the Espace Saint-Rémi; a former church, built between the 11th and 15th centuries.

Cosying up to the water plants in the Jardin Botanique, the monumental Pot 815 (1968) – an icon of contemporary art – plays upon the various vistas on display within the gardens, and can be interpreted as a radical self-portrait of the artist. An industrial object originally designed to hold soil, Jean Pierre Raynaud’s flowerpots do not, however, contain mulch capable of sustaining plant life. The cement which fills them is the assertion of an artistic identity forged in resistance and ceaseless questioning.

Finally, the CAPC will exhibit Dépoli [Frosted] (1991), a book-object which invites the viewer to question the interior and the exterior – what’s on the inside, and what’s on the outside – alongside the mirrored text of the aphorism Que chacun enchante sa prison [Art for Life], which gives this off-site exhibition its name.

Following on the heels of Richard Long in 2017, Jean Pierre Raynaud thus represents another major figure in contemporary art who will feature as part of the cultural season Liberté ! Bordeaux 2019, and whose work will be the focus of an off-site exhibition marrying several key pieces from the CAPC’s collection with various locations around the city.

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OFF-SITE EXHIBITION

Traduit du français par Kelly Smith

Jean Pierre RaynaudQue chacun enchante sa prison

CAPC musée d'art contemporain de BordeauxEspace Saint-Rémi, Grand-Théâtre, Jardin Botanique

“In the past, I feared being trapped in my project, today I am wary of being trapped in

my freedom. I think travelling is beneficial for my flowerpots. It delays their entry into the

world of static objects in museums.” 1

An extraordinary artist, who considers freedom to be primarily “an extremely powerful but also devastating thing”2, Jean Pierre Raynaud has been invited to the CAPC musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux for this second cultural season on the theme of freedom. This project has its roots in 2017, when the artist (born in 1939) published a collection of aphorisms, L'Art à perpétuité [Art for Life]. This title in the form of a “life sentence” illustrates the artist’s paradoxical relationship with the notion of freedom, which lies somewhere between commitment and confinement. This exhibition is a journey outside the walls of the museum, offering four encounters in three of the city’s3 unique architectural sites and in a water garden4.

What does freedom mean for a contemporary artist?

There are many answers to this question: freedom of thought, creation, exhibition, and expression of choices and beliefs… For Jean Pierre Raynaud, it means the possibility, as a free man, to distance himself from what he calls “the outside world”: our world. While leaving our inexorable disappearance for the future, the artist, who asserts that “art is a formidable prison”, invites individuals to discover his installations, sculptures, and environments, and to feel the tension he instils between the place and his work, the past and the present.

Jean Pierre Raynaud’s installations are populated with objects from the medical world (white tiles, surgical steel containers, frosted glass) or the world of prisons (railings, bars, chains) and signs that evoke urgency or danger (no entry or nuclear risk signs, weapons, coffins, etc.). The artist emphasises that he has simply “enchanted his prison” and that he has “this dream ability to live each moment”. He adds that “I like the idea that I am a prisoner of myself, but I am not a prisoner of others, and that changes everything, because everything becomes poetry.”

The exhibition Que chacun enchante sa prison [Enchanting our Prisons] sheds light on the profound meaning of works that explore our relationship with life, death, others, and ourselves.

Jardin Botanique

Pot 815, 1968Laminated polyester, stones, paintHeight: 180 cmCollection of CAPC musée d’art contemporain de BordeauxInv. 1994-07

Starting from the appropriation of reality to express a personal psychodrama (the Psycho-Objects series, 1963-1970), Jean Pierre Raynaud gives the objects he salvages great emotional and psychological potential. He creates striking environments using simple manipulations, essentially based on assemblages of objects embodying urgency, the medical world, confinement, or death, on white tiled surfaces. The flowerpot is an object that is presented alone or in a series. Often associated

1. In RAYNAUD – Autoportrait, Editions du Regard, Paris, 2015, p. 157.2. Unless otherwise specified, all the quotes come from a conversation between the artist andAnne Cadenet held in Paris on April 5, 2019.3. Espace Saint-Rémi, the Grand-Théâtre (Salon Boireau and Salon Lalande) and the CAPC.4. The Jardin Botanique.

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with the New Realists, who worked by accumulating salvaged objects and combining them in their own specific dialectic, the artist limits the number and colour of his objects, preferring the formal rigour of the minimalists. In doing so, he highlights the affective and emotional power of his objects. Thus, the flowerpot becomes a self-portrait, a permanent figure of the artist within his work. Pot 815 is Jean Pierre Raynaud’s first monumental pot.

“I was a gardener before I was an artist, so that might explain it, but that’s just skimming the surface. When I stopped studying gardening, it was the time of the Algerian War. It was a difficult period, and I went away for two and a half years. When I came back, I was so broken that I was bedridden. Deep down, I no longer wanted any contact with the outside world. I lived a life of autarky. I’m sure that’s treatable, but I had realised I could live with myself, without feeling like I was betraying others. It was 1962, and, by chance, one day when I no longer wanted to get back up, to live a ‘natural’ life, I was swept up in a kind of momentum that was out of my control, and I went downstairs into a little garage. I was living in the suburbs of Paris, in Colombes, my 2CV was there and the tires were flat, everything was asleep, just like me, and I saw a flowerpot, a tin of red paint, and a bag of cement. It was on the left as I entered the garage, I remember it very well, and after doing nothing but lie down, I felt a physical need to do something with my hands... I took this cement and I put it in the pot. It was a little feverish, there was the tin of paint and I didn’t wait for the cement to dry, I opened it, I dipped my hand in, and did it like that. And in that moment, I felt myself being reborn... I found a path that I have remained on ever since; I have never lain down again... Starting paradoxically with a thing of life, because you put plants in it so they can live, I prevented life coming out of it, telling myself it wasn’t life from which I expected something, but my action; and it’s true that for me, this act was a way of making a decision and changing my life. This big pot, a kind of red icon that is 1.8 m high and not filled with cement, is an object that has punctuated my life for many years, and which for me, remains completely intact. It has the freshness, the innocence of the beginning, I stuck with this minimalist action, a single act.”

Espace Saint-Rémi

Manifeste, 1984 Metal, mattresses, covers, sheets, paint on canvasVariable dimensionsCollection of CAPC musée d’art contemporain de BordeauxInv. 1994-06

In 1984, the AFAA (Association Française d’Action Artistique) invited Jean Pierre Raynaud to take part in French Spirit Today, a programme of exhibitions showing work by young French artists in Californian museums. For this occasion, he created Manifeste, which would be exhibited at the Newport Harbour Art Museum (now known as the Orange County Museum of Art). Consisting of a series of white metal hospital beds lined up in a “U” Shape around three walls and the same number of white canvases painted with black stripes hanging over the headboards, the work is striking for the distant recollections it suggests to every one of us. A psychiatric confinement unit or a prison, an austere meditation cell… the tension produced by the dialogue between the installation and the exhibition space is fascinating, between clinical coldness and interrogation. Manifeste was exhibited in Tokyo, then at the ARC (Paris) in 1985. It became part of the CAPC’s collection in 1994 thanks to a donation from the artist. In the nave of the former Saint-Rémi church, the work is again displayed around three walls, as it was when it was first presented at the Newport Harbour Art Museum.

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“Subconsciously, I acknowledge that a person will have an emotional shock... It’s not a problem of seductive strategy, but I am offering this unmentionable, incomprehensible thing when someone arrives in front of the beds, there is solitude; the person (looking) will feel a little naked in front of this thing, they will react to this lack, to this emptiness, to this order, to this hygiene, and ultimately, it takes them into something that they feel without really experiencing it. My story is one of being immersed in it, and that is why I am comfortable in this demonstration. I also know that someone will be able to encounter this undefinable thing, that it will speak to them, but without obviously giving them an answer. But that will back them up against a wall, their own personal wall.”

Grand-Théâtre, salon Boireau

La Maison [The House], 1969-1993Surgical steel containers, construction materials, white ceramic tilesVariable dimensionsCollection of the CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux and Linda & Guy Pieters, BelgiumInv. 1998-08

Jean Pierre Raynaud believes that “art deserves all audacities” and requires unlimited commitment, like that he felt with his work La Maison [The House]. A monumental and architectural sculpture that he constructed in La Celle Saint-Cloud, near Paris, La Maison underwent incessant changes to its architecture. Destroyed in 1993 by the artist, it was exhibited in the same year in the nave of the CAPC, in the form of an installation comprising a thousand stainless steel containers containing the debris of the house: plaster, bricks, cement, and white ceramic tiles with black grout.

“La Maison has a whole story behind it. It is the cornerstone of my building, because it happened in 1968-69. This architecture restates my fundamentals, a relationship between the interior and the exterior. We are all familiar with the events of 1968. I was the right age to throw cobblestones... I never did, because it wasn’t my protest, it wasn’t my war. Some artists hated me, considering me a traitor. Perhaps I betrayed them, but it wasn’t my vocation. I told myself that I was going to build myself a place and shut myself inside. I know this world is there, but it will be outside the windows, I don’t need to have it with me… so this house was a kind of armour, a kind of protection, there was a big arrow slit and I could see the world outside, but I was seeing it from afar, and I was at peace with it. I was able to develop this relationship with myself for 25 years, and I was at the heart of myself. I surrounded myself – floor, walls, ceiling – with white tiles joined by black grout. There was a modernity close to a Bauhaus architecture, a sort of equation based on the same module, a monumental infinity and inside it, a magnificent silence, the world at a distance… Then, I felt that this time, and the time of this space, were over. I was living with La Maison like you live with a person, but, quite simply, the house was inert. In 1993, I was bold enough to tell myself this house was finished. They were proposing to make it a Historical Monument and I didn’t like the idea, because this had been a living experience for me, and I didn’t want it to become yet another sanctuary that people come to worship. So I channelled my artistic violence into a logical action and I put it in a thousand surgical containers… I was not destroying, I was creating, I was continuing to make decisions, and that made me a very active agent in my own life. I have high expectations of the installation at the Grand-Théâtre de Bordeaux, because it will show that La Maison continues to live, and that it does not live like an object from the past, but that it is being constantly reborn and transformed. I can’t wait to see the containers invade this space, to not take power but to be in their place, and for the architecture to find its place too… Two dreams will meet, with a few centuries between them...”

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Grand-Théâtre, salon Lalande

La Maison de Jean Pierre Raynaud [Jean Pierre Raynaud's House], 1993Colour film – 30 minutesAuthor-director: Michelle PorteProduction/Broadcasting: Cameras continentales, Intermedia,La Sept ARTE

Michelle Porte’s film La Maison de Jean Pierre Raynaud, 1969-1993 documents an exceptional event in the work and life of Jean Pierre Raynaud. The director tells the tale of love and a “murder of passion” that connects the artist to this work.

CAPC, Bureau des Artistes (1st floor mezzanine)

Dépoli [Frosted], 1991Wood, translucent paper sheet, glass, paper96,8 x 50,5 x 5,5 cmCollection of CAPC musée d’art contemporain de BordeauxInv. 2018-30

Dépoli [Frosted] is a question-provoking object-book. Exhibited in a small room looking out over the museum’s mezzanines, the work takes the form of a white lacquered wooden frame around a lithographed sheet of white paper showing an identical reproduction of 15 x 15 cm white ceramic tiles that Jean Pierre Raynaud has been using since 1972. Two panes of glass protect the lithograph and enclose a sheet of translucent paper creating the illusion of frosted glass covering two thirds of the height.

“The frosted glass comes to me from the medical world, from ambulances. When a casualty is taken away in an ambulance, the windows are frosted, to avoid an aggressive light. It is a filter, a boundary between the outside world and the subject. All I am really doing is poeticising one side of the space.”

Jean Pierre Raynaud, Raynaud Aphorismes, 2017;

Handwritten title on wall by Jean Pierre Raynaud, June 2019

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Jean Pierre Raynaud during the set-up of La Maison at the Grand-Théâtre, Bordeaux, 25 June 2019.

©Adagp, Paris, 2019. Photo: Frédéric Deval / mairie de Bordeaux.

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Jean Pierre Raynaud

Jean Pierre Raynaud, born in 1939 in Courbevoie, lives and works in Paris. After attending horticultural school near Versailles and qualifying in 1958, a few years later he decided not to pursue this path. Nevertheless, this training left him with a constant attachment to and interest in gardens and nature.

In 1959, he did his military service, and was not demobilised until 1961. Then came two years of inactivity and withdrawal, which led him to art and made him the artist he is today, causing him to state: “I’m no good at writing, I’m no good at painting, I’m no good at life, but I would die for the form and not for the content. Perhaps that is why Art salvaged me.”5

Jean Pierre Raynaud’s artistic career began in 1964 with his participation in the Salon de la Jeune Sculpture exhibition in Paris, then with the two solo exhibitions devoted to him in 1965 and 1966 by the Galerie Jean Larcade and Mathias Fels. At this time, the critics Pierre Restany and François Pluchard emphasised the formal radicalness of this young artist and the psychological power of his assemblages. His works are striking for their signature dimension: objects externalising a form of violence and anguish in the face of life and the social model meet a Duchampian and minimal aesthetic, dominated by white and red. In 1967, Raynaud took part in the ninth São Paulo Biennial in Brazil, and in 1968, several solo exhibitions explored his artistic vision. In 1969, the white tiles with black grout appeared for the first time, for a work commissioned by collector Jean-Marie Rossi. This was also the year when Jean Pierre Raynaud had his house in La Celle Saint-Cloud built. One and a half years later, he divorced and decided to entirely transform this space, covering the inside with 15 cm x 15 cm white ceramic tiles. A space of pure contemplation, untouched by everyday life, for the artist, La Maison was a “super Psycho-Object, the matrix of the works...”6. In 1988, he closed the house and in 1993, he decided to demolish it and exhibited the debris in the nave of the CAPC, in a thousand containers.

From 1968 to today, Jean Pierre Raynaud has been constantly exhibiting around the world, each time creating a powerful piece in the formal vocabulary of Psycho-Objects. The Pot doré, probably the artist’s most famous work, exhibited in the Forbidden City in Beijing, hanging from a crane over the Potsdamer Platz building site in Berlin, and now on level 6 of the Pompidou Centre in Paris, is the “archetype of the archetype that sets the tone, the direction, and the method”. The Mastaba 1 (1986) is another sculptural architecture in La Garennes-Colombes, built with the help of architect Jean Dedieu. Acquired by the town in 2006, it became a cultural centre where the artist’s works are exhibited. Other commissions and monumental works include the windows of the Cistercian abbey of Noirlac (which Raynaud designed in 1973 and which were a crucial turning point in his work, with an important reflection on light), the planned Tour Blanche des Minguettes in Lyon, which was never built, and the monumental self-portrait (destroyed then recreated this year) for the city of Quebec. His installations related to the series of Vietnamese, Soviet, French, and Cuban flags gave rise to multiple exhibitions all around the world. They earned him the Unesco Prize in 2000, in the context of the Havana Biennial.

BIOGRAPHY

5. « Entretien avec Gilbert Perlein », in catalogue at the exhibition Les Raynaud de Raynaud, 25 March-10 September 2006, MAMAC Nice.6. Ibid.

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AVAILABLE IMAGES FOR THE PRESS

IMAGE 1

Jean Pierre Raynaud, La Maison [The House], 1969-1993Collection of the CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux and Linda & Guy Pieters, BelgiumOff-site exhibition Que chacun enchante sa prison, installation view at Grand-Théâtre, Bordeaux (12 July – 1st September 2019)©Adagp, Paris, 2019Photo: Frédéric Deval / mairie de Bordeaux

IMAGE 2

Jean Pierre Raynaud, Pot 815, 1968Collection of CAPC musée d’art contemporain de BordeauxOff-site exhibition Que chacun enchante sa prison, installation view at Jardin Botanique, Bordeaux (12 July – 22 September 2019)©Adagp, Paris, 2019 Photo: Frédéric Deval / mairie de Bordeaux

IMAGE 3

Jean Pierre Raynaud, Pot 815, 1968Collection of CAPC musée d’art contemporain de BordeauxOff-site exhibition Que chacun enchante sa prison, installation view at Jardin Botanique, Bordeaux (12 July – 22 September 2019)©Adagp, Paris, 2019 Photo: Frédéric Deval / mairie de Bordeaux

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IMAGE 4

Jean Pierre Raynaud, Manifeste, 1984Collection of CAPC musée d’art contemporain de BordeauxOff-site exhibition Que chacun enchante sa prison, installation view at Espace Saint-Rémi, Bordeaux (12 July – 22 September 2019)©Adagp, Paris, 2019 Photo: Frédéric Deval / mairie de Bordeaux

IMAGE 5

Jean Pierre Raynaud, Manifeste, 1984Collection of CAPC musée d’art contemporain de BordeauxOff-site exhibition Que chacun enchante sa prison, installation view at Espace Saint-Rémi, Bordeaux (12 July – 22 September 2019)©Adagp, Paris, 2019 Photo: Frédéric Deval / mairie de Bordeaux

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GrandThéâtre

01.09.2019)La Maison, 1993

Place desQuinconces

Pont de Pierre

CAPCDépoli, 1991

EspaceSaint-RémiManifeste, 1984

Garo

nne

Garon

ne

BAT3

Quinconces(Jean Jaurès)

TRAM BCAPC

BAT3

Stalingrad(Parlier)

JardinBotaniquePot 815, 1968

TRAM AStalingrad

TRAM BQuinconces

TRAM B

(Until

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Timetables and maps of public transport:

https://www.infotbm.com/fr/horaires-et-plans.html

* More information on www.capc-bordeaux.fr

PRACTICAL INFORMATION

OPENING TIMES, ADMISSION FEES AND ACCESS

Grand-Théâtreplace de la ComédieTuesday to Sunday from 11:30am to 6:30pm. Closed on MondaysFee: 9,5 €; reduced 5 €.Reduced rate for holders of a CAPC entrance ticketTram: line B, stop Grand-Théâtre; line C, stop QuinconcesBatcub [River shuttle]: Pier Quinconces (Jean Jaurès)

Espace Saint-Rémi4 rue JouannetTuesday to Friday from 11am to 6pm. Saturdays and Sundays from 11am to 7pm.Closed on MondaysFree admissionTram: line B, stop Grand-Théâtre; line C, stop place de la BourseBatcub [River shuttle]: Pier Quinconces (Jean Jaurès)

Jardin Botaniqueesplanade LinnéEvery day from 8am to 8pmFree admissionTram: line A, stop Jardin BotaniqueBatcub [River shuttle]: Pier Stalingrad (Parlier)

CAPC musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux7 rue FerrèreTuesday to Sunday from 11am to 6pm, until 8pm every second Wednesday of the month.Closed on MondaysFee: 7 €; reduced 4 €. Free admission for holders of a Grand-Théâtre entrance ticket *Tram: line B, stop CAPC; line C, stop Jardin PublicBatcub [River shuttle]: Pier Quinconces (Jean Jaurès)

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Jean Pierre Raynaud, Manifeste [Manisfest], 1984. Collection of CAPC musée d’art contemporain de

Bordeaux. Off-site exhibition Que chacun enchante sa prison, installation view at Espace Saint-Rémi,

Bordeaux (12 July – 22 September 2019). ©Adagp, Paris, 2019

Photo: Frédéric Deval / mairie de Bordeaux / mairie de Bordeaux

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