"For me, art was the first gesture I made in my garage, a gesture that seemed fundamental to me; there was nothing to sell."
Driven by a visceral need to express himself, Jean-Pierre Raynaud one day in 1962 made a decisive gesture by filling a flower pot with cement. Free, daring, transgressive, this first gesture would never leave him. From then on, the artist will develop conceptual work around the object; flowerpot, forbidden meaning, ceramic tile would become his vocabulary, which he was to conjugate endlessly. The radicality of his visual language, exploring a dialogue between mental and real, places him among the great personalities of the contemporary art scene. The artist confides in us, with humility and integrity, his joys and regrets, tells us about his work as a self-portraitist and about his quest for which he seeks the next gesture, the ultimate achievement. Glacial and distant, his work presents itself as a vision of the world, cruel certainly, but situated beyond anguish and violence: man is absent from it, and “nothing here”, as Alain wrote. Jouffroy, “is not expressed, but everything is shown…”