The first complete inventory of Hubert Renard's work, between 1969 and 1998, includes all finished works, paintings, sculptures, installations, unique or multiple pieces.
“Hubert Renard's work (...) focuses his attention on the artwork's condition of being in the world, starting from its material structure and its constants, producing varied projects on the work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility.
He then turned to the manipulation of the press, the use of photography and brings together various autonomous artworks to create installations within the museum space, which became his trademark, so to speak. Whether he is exploring or questioning, Hubert Renard is constantly weighing up the stereotypes surrounding the artist and the artefact, the commentator and the viewer, the institution and the alternative space.
At the opposite extreme from Une monographie's fertile disorder, the catalogue raisonné's chronological order and nominal approach mean that this publication should not be seen as a faithful emanation of Renard's gesture in book form. Taken separately from the rest of his work, the artworks here crystallise succession, direction and structural and chronological developments. The artist's career becomes an enumeration of specific objects, step by step. However, as we shall see, the peculiarities of the catalogue raisonné not only reveal the characteristics of the artist's work, but constitute an unprecedented analysis, an extraordinary review, confirming not only that this exploratory tool was necessary to his work, but that it in fact constitutes an essential reference framework.
But what is a catalogue raisonné? It is the presentation of the work of an artist, by categorising their complete works rather than telling the story of their evolution, in a synchronic, not diachronic mode. An inventory of their work, used by professionals in the art world: museum curators and their assistants, cultural administrators, historians, gallery owners and commissioning officers, collectors, critics, agents, restorers, patrons, teachers, experts, documentarians and all of their interns. Generally speaking, the catalogue raisonné may be useful to any fan of an artist's work, providing them with a complete and organised overview, or to provide some access to pieces that are often scattered around the world, sometimes inaccessible because they are stored in private collections, or because they have never left the artist's studio or been reproduced anywhere, to discover detailed information or significant anecdotes. However, it should be noted that the catalogue raisonné has met with only limited success among the general public, and it is a good idea to ask why that is.”
Alain Farfall
Limited edition of 200 copies.
The work of Hubert Renard (born 1965 in Lyon, lives and works in Paris) is ubiquitous in the sense that it exists simultaneously at different moments in time, in the different periods in which it is inscribed, but also through the different facets of his persona and the reflection it sets up. Like Schrodinger's cat, his work is both dead and alive, in progress but also finished, and the presence of the artist himself is often manifested... by his absence. In a sense, one could say that it is based on the classical aesthetic bases of “re-presentation”, constantly playing on the disorder of the disappearance and appearance of its subject. The artist, the work and its model are merged, and like the myth of Dibutade, the model is present then absent, the work is valid for him and functions as a sign, at the same time index and icon.
