Screened from July 23 to September 30, 2025
Meat Drop, 2010, HD Film, 02′04″, 16:9, stereo
Presentation
“Homeless Strategy”
Antoine Renard’s sculptures are first of all the result of action. Nothing is truly created ex nihilo. Rather it is recycled, transposed, regenerated. Like in 2011 in Leipzig, where rather than producing a work in the space that had been allocated to him, he preferred to remove the flooring, turning it into a replica Amazonian pirogue with which he explored the surroundings of the gallery – via the canal that passes nearby – then at the end of the exhibition, he returned to reposition the pieces of wood that had been removed, exactly where he had taken them from in the flooring.
The encounter with an object is often the starting point of an installation. He has chosen it in his daily life or during his travels. He never evacuates the original meaning; on the contrary, he questions it in its capacity to generate a system, or a topology. Like a 19th century naturalist, he gathers specimens, objects as well as plants, whose properties he studies before putting them to the test of a new reality. It is the unknown that interests him, the wild, especially that which resists the apparent control of our societies.
Toxic plants are among the inevitable dross of the modern world, gathered in a wasteland at the heart of the city. And then a geography manual dated 1929, discovered by chance on a stroll. The World Except For Europe announces the title. The exhibited book becomes a tool for transformation, questioned in its almost “magical” capacity as a projection. We think of the apprehensions of the territory by the Situationists, those psychogeographies formulated from subjective wanderings. “The main difficulty of the drift is freedom” wrote Debord. Drifting therefore like a manner of escaping power. Would the artist’s roving, be a strategic tool for an urban guerrilla war?
Dispersal, infiltration. Finding oneself where we are not expected. Like the document (found on the web) written by a member of Al-Quaida which explains in 22 points how to protect from and react to attacks from American drones. One of the points advises furthermore staying sheltered under a tree. Antoine Renard has used it to make the wall paper of his installation where he places a beautiful poisonous plant. The environment, in the intimate mode, becomes a laboratory, a place of reading, of possible contamination.
Reinvention of an offbeat present. Testing the present sometimes curls around the absurd. Like in the video Meat Drop, where we see the free fall of a piece of meat. Here the material is subject to an inappropriate physical space, a sort of madness that accomplishes something which should not be. This capturing of an extraordinary moment is however not without poetry. The bloody material floats in the air, escapes, returns to the detractor’s hands. It is almost a character from Beckett, a prisoner of his condition, exposed to the torpor of a muffled threat, both humorous and deeply moving.
In Praise of Movement.
Sandra Adam-Couralet
Biography
Antoine Renard (born in 1984 in Paris) is a French artist living and working between Paris and Lourdes, France. A graduate of the Dijon School of Fine Arts (DNSEP, 2008), he has been awarded several prestigious grants and residencies, including the Inkubator Innovator Fellowship (Germany, 2015), Goethe-Institut Residency in Prague (Czech Republic, 2017), Cheval Noir Residency with Komplot in Brussels (Belgium, 2018), and the Occitanie Award from Villa Medici (France, 2019). That same year, he received the CNAP production grant and joined the Cité internationale des arts in Paris. In 2020, he was selected for the doctoral program SACRe at Université PSL, where his research — under the supervision of Pascal Rousseau — explores olfaction as an expanded field of sculpture.
Antoine Renard has presented solo exhibitions at major institutions, including Psychobotania at Cité des Sciences, Paris (2022), PHARMAKON at CRAC Occitanie, Sète (2021), Geometries of -l-o-v-e at Very, Berlin (2019), and Cats in the City at Komplot, Brussels (2018), among others.
He is represented by Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris/Brussels, since 2020.