RAOUL REYNOLDS: A RETROSPECTIVE

A name that clears your throat, catches your ear and ends up infiltrating your thoughts. If you have not heard of Raoul Reynolds, that comes as no surprise. In the shadows he remained, in silence. Raoul Reynolds was one whose many dark paths in life— despite ardent investigation — leave us with countless unanswered questions.

 
Raoul Reynolds was a pedlar, a confidence trickster, a camelot of art, a storybook character thumbing his nose at History with a capital H as it speeds unforgivingly by, retaining only its handful of chosen ones to blacken its pages and fill up our libraries. Here, we are offered another experience: change the angle and look at the margin. Artist, his default role, he used as a cover for his life of secrets while creating works of art as if they were gateways that would enable him to cross through time. He would be beaten at his own game though, while furiously creating pieces with enough impertinence to assimilate and crystallise myriad 20th century artistic movements.

Alternately a surrealist and a minimalist, he would overcome stylistic barriers and wear the most unexpected masks. It was more particularly at the end of his life, though, during exile, that he let himself indulge totally, undistractedly in art. 
Here is a retrospective path, a set of works attributed to him, a hypothetical stack where our certainties sometimes give way to doubts, and doubts give way to stories fuelled by our own fantasies.
 

A project by Amandine Guruceaga & Francesca Zappia 

Texts: Jenny Brownrigg, Guillaume Condello, Timothée Chaillou, Anna Dezeuze, Éric Mangion 

The book was made possible thanks to the participation of Stéphanie Cherpin, Helen de Main, Sandro Della Noce, Guillaume Gattier, Amandine Guruceaga, Benjamin Marianne, James McLardy, Douglas Morland, Philippe Murphy, Bobby Niven, Alys Owen, Emilie Perotto and the poet Guillaume Condello.

Published by Poursuite Editions
164 pgs, 24 × 17 cm, Softcover, 2018
ISBN: 978-2-490140-05-3

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