RENAUD JACQUIER STAJNOWICZ

Born in 1952, lives and works in Chavanod, Haute-Savoie.

Who would suspect the complexity of assembling the chassis, the precision required to juxtapose the elements to transform a flat surface into a three-dimensional "object"?

Jacquier-Stajnowicz's canvases, whose dimensions are dictated by his own height, never simply adhere to conventional forms. Each figure, in taking shape, becomes an element in its own right, requiring its own individual frame. Each element submits to the same requirement: to constitute the form of the work, the one initially conceived by the artist. Assembled, they obey the creator's design and thus become the essence of the work.

Thus, form becomes content and content becomes form. From this ambivalence arises the impression of great strength, immediately contradicted by the intuition of extreme fragility.

Excerpt from the preface by Christiane Talmard

“I am all that is, that was, and that will be, and no mortal has lifted my veil” (1). And what if this inscription were addressed to painting itself, to art simply, as if the act of painting, the ceremony of painting, revealed to us the impossibility of unveiling? Will painting lend this helping hand, this “snatched” gesture by which the secret allows itself to be stolen? There is indeed something here, as if by fraud, that insinuates itself and renders the concern for understanding useless.

 And yet, everything is there, within reach: transparent and profound colors, commanding, a refuge of innocence, the key to a shared language, to the relationships between beings. Jacquier-Stajnowicz chooses monochrome, a way

The physical process of bringing the surface to the point of impact makes any hold fragile. Non-descriptive color avoids "radical" inflation in order to favor intervention, the act of painting itself.

Unconstrained by doctrine or a closed system, the gesture can freely probe pictorial space and ignite reality to the point of astonishment, a representation of the “unpresentable” or a “brilliance of presentation.” Reality, “the property of that which saturates the senses,” according to Valéry (2), overflows to excess, an excess that insists and resists until it leaves us speechless. The absence of a subject, or rather its overflowing, rises above, opening a field where the scale of the painting is indeed the scale of the body.

Painting forms a family where the alliance between eye and heart is forged in the ebb and flow of the walker's steps, in the rhythms of their rhythms. White, black, blue, the gaze crashes, scrutinizes the image, traversing it from floor to wall and beyond, confronted by the space of the place, closed in its muteness. At the last moment, at full speed, the painting escapes control, the closure that would lead it toward a finished state where the balance between "personal and impersonal," that precise point between being and nature, would be lost. This approach vaporizes the tenacious ideas of painting as object, easel painting as sculpture. Y. Klein (3) states that "his monochrome propositions are landscapes of freedom, I am an Impressionist and a disciple of Delacroix." Jacquier-Stajnowicz agrees with him in the dematerialization of color into a body that is "immaculate, calm, relaxed.".

The painting reveals its secret until we are left breathless, stunned, upon arrival and on the edge of the canvas, “little sister,” we must now remember what came before; seen between pleasure and displeasure. Only painting allows this pursuit, this way of hurtling down the surface in the light, regardless of the distance for us, the subject, “unbearable spoiled child” (4). The pursuit only has reason to exist in order to touch the invisible within the visible, at the moment when the space between myself and things is connected only by lived experience. The plastic intensity of Jacquier-Stajnowicz’s works makes it almost possible to explore what drives the gesture, and conversely, its silence disturbs us, carefully avoiding showing it. This disquiet is solicited when it comes to shake our codes to the point of collapsing our will to power and provoking panic. Then, a certain idea of ​​beauty intrudes unexpectedly, in a flash.

1 Inscription from the Temple of Isis, E. Kant, Critique of the Faculty of Judgment (CF) Akademie Ausgabe, Berlin 1913 - 2 P. Valéry, in his notebooks - 3 Y. Klein, in his diary, August 23, 1957 - 4 C. Lévi-Strauss

Elisabeth Chambon, curator of the Géo-Charles Museum