Renaud Regnery. Tatem und Tobu

About

One thinks one knows the visual strategies in Renaud Regnery's current exhibition but one doesn't 're – cognize' them: large-format, pink monochromatic surfaces; behind that, strict grid images, which bring to mind the optics of geometry and remind one of constructivist modern painting. As the title of the exhibit already suggests, the two formally different seeming work groups create a series of displacements.

The geometric abstractions are pictorial materializations of original wallpaper, which, during the course of the American Depression in the 1930s, in order to 'aetheticize' the everyday, was printed with a tile pattern in a Trompe-l'œil style, to simulate scrubresistant tiling in the most economically feasible way. The works by no means follow the modern self referential pattern. Instead, they step out of their context quite autonomously, only to be collected together again by their history and concrete functional value. They are performances of their own materiality and origin; are images and junctures simultaneously. As such they connect with spaces outside the image surface — with societal relationships, with our day-to-day experiences, and with that which we are affectively used to seeing and desiring.

Birgit Effinger (excerpt from exhibition text)