Renaud Regnery

Viet Cong

In Viet Cong Regnery challenges the possibilities of recognition and association in the viewer according to their own learned references, exploring idiosyncrasies through layers of subtraction and addition. Beginning with a foundation of culturally imbued wallpapers on canvas, Regnery develops a multidimensional critical strategy.

The surfaces are sanded, burned, dissolved or defiled, and combined with silk-screened interpretations of their own motifs printed with volatile and metamorphic materials like iridescent pigments, holographic foils, iron rust, copper powder, puffy paint, and animal blood. In Regnery’s collaged paintings these elementary practices together with the use of computer layering and modeling softwares compound and challenge cultural references, associations and signifiers seen through the lens of the digital age of ambiguity in which we live.

A cultural mash up is occurring when an Austrian Alpine village like Hallstadt can be cloned in the province of Guangdong, China, and IKEA sells Donald Judd-style furniture. Regnery’s work examines the uncontainable corruption of knowledge and potentials within the information feedback loop to reveal complex elements about changing of historical meanings in the human psyche.

Art Historian Robert Hobbs tells us, “While many abstract expressionists embraced the aesthetics of the palimpsest as a cogent symbol for the workings of the many layers of the subconscious mind, Regnery relies on this metaphoric structure as a way to incorporate different times and velocities in his works, making them compelling references to an ongoing ontogenesis as well as sets of ruins capable of alluding to multiple events that spatialize history at the same time they temporalize space.”

The exhibition is accompanied by a publication with a text by Robert Hobbs.