“I don’t think of myself as much of a political painter, but ultimately, every gesture is political. When I say that I disrupt orders, it is also meant politically. And metaphorically, that’s what I do all the time.” - Renaud Regnery, 2019
About
What Power Art Thou? is Renaud Regnery’s fifth solo exhibition at Klemm’s and is presented as part of Gallery Weekend Berlin 2023. For the first time in Regnery’s oeuvre, the large-scale and at times oversized paintings assembled in the exhibition dovetail almost classically oil-painted, pictorial elements with a painting ground that the artist himself commissioned and was then industrially produced. Regnery has sketch-like motifs, oversized details, pop references, and ‘image-material’ from tech-industry and advertising showing a beading effect collide with elements of a vernacular imagery: Witches, pigs and vampires populate the picture plane, rubbing shoulders, commenting and contrasting with their surroundings.
Regnery shows us an amalgamated visual world—multifaceted, gestural and resolutely direct, bold, catchy and resistant all at once—that questions our understanding of the contemporary world, its pictorial representation and painting itself.
Text by Laetitia Chauvin