Artist: Renaud Jerez
Exhibition title: When Tania arrived home
Venue: Crèvecoeur, Paris, France
Date: January 15 – March 5, 2016
Photography: images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Crèvecoeur, Paris
For his second solo show at Crèvecoeur, Renaud Jerez creates a domestic environment full of figures made out of building materials (metal, plaster, plumbing pipes) to which he adds accessories and materials evoking an advanced state of civilisation (synthetic fur, camera lens).
The mummified sculptures, present in his work for several years, tend to mute, simultaneously and with no hierarchy, to a possible animal state, to shift to a more advanced state of development, or to a fossilisation of beings that we can not classify according to the known criteria.
The characters are surrounded by elements of housing and furniture, which appear at first sight familiar (windows, low roofs, sofas), but which have gone through transformations and alterations. They seem to have been dismembered and contaminated, in an organic way, by the human and animal presence of the beings who are living around.
Renaud Jerez implements in his work consumption and contamination strategies aiming to sabotage notions of hygiene and fluidity, so valuable in our contemporary civilization. Litterally and figuratively, the beings he conceives – reflection of mankind playing to improve itself through technologically mediated reality – parasite their environment, even though it seemed meant to fit them.
Renaud Jerez had various solo exhibitions, particularly at the National Gallery (Prague, 2015), at GAMEC (Bergamo, 2014), at Autocenter (Berlin, 2014), at Marbriers 4 (Geneva, 2014), at MOT International (London, 2013) and soon at Farenheit (Los Angeles, 2016) and at the ICA Miami (2016).
His work has also been shown at the Neuer Aachener Kunstverein (Aachen, 2015), at the New Museum (New York, 2015), at The Box (Los Angeles, 2015), at Catherine Bastide (Bruxelles, 2015 and 2013), at the Palais de Tokyo (Paris, 2014), at the K11 Foundation (Shangai, 2015), at Carlos Ishikawa (London, 2014) and at the David Roberts Art Foundation (London, 2014). In 2014 he co-curated and participated to the show DOOM: SURFACE contrôle at Le Magasin in Grenoble.
