Raynald Driez "La Soif Grandiose" (The grand thirst)
“The alliance between eroticism and the sacred, crucifixes neighbouring languid forms, the uncanny coexistence of death, desire and an ascending prayer… Of course, none of this is new under the sun. But the power of Driez’s creative act, be it in the form of painting, ceramic, or poetry, is due precisely to this candid boldness – or should we indeed call it innocent? I think so – that prompts him to tackle such immemorial, arguably threadbare themes, instead of choosing to explore new paths. […] Driez is a meticulous jester, a Classic entangled in the twists and turns of a culture which, having exhausted every possible representation, ends up with its back against the wall of what is essential: desire, death, prayer, it’s so simple…”
Gilles Farcet
Throughout his paintings, ceramics, and drawings, Raynald Driez initially posed as an apostle of the pleasures of the flesh, happily mischievous, readily voluptuous, to then gradually take on more poisonous undertones with the ‘Fin-de-siècle’-inspired exhibition Chrysalida, in an explicit dialogue with the ghost of a licentious Verlaine, aka Loyola.
The ensemble of works presented on the occasion of Driez’s third personal exhibition at Polad-Hardouin gallery imposes a further metamorphosis on that flesh, now converted into a receptacle of the sacred, of the aspiration toward something inexplicable and beyond our comprehension.
The universe that emerges from Driez’s paintings – where skulls, crucifixes and vanitas mix with virgins and nudes – evokes a Baroque visual rhetoric aimed at giving visibility to the invisible through a grammar of ostentation. The crucifix becomes the omnipresent and structural element of his paintings. It recurs in multiple and protean forms in the Wunderkammer where vanitas and ciboria are assembled under the supervision of a hooded doll. The same doll returns as the single protagonist of another painting, radiant and present as if she had just come out of a dark night. We encounter her again in L’Imitation de Furrius. A naked woman sitting with her legs crossed, in a position evocative of some of Schiele’s models, gazing at us with eyes full of murky tenderness as she curls up against a glaring cross.
The metallic backgrounds give a peculiar lustre to the ensemble: to the ever-present golden backgrounds of religious painting, Driez prefers letting the special sheen and vibrant, skin-like tints of copper emerge from the dark.
In his ceramics, Driez composes a personal Pantheon made up of virgins and nudes: a black virgin with two snakes slithering out of her wounded heart, young reclining women with Gorgon hair, or this other Mary holding in her arms, in a striking shortcut, the Golgotha skull instead of the baby. This skull echoes other, larger-than-nature skulls, multi-coloured and shimmering, furtively inviting the viewer to become lost in their contemplation.
This grand thirst (and thirst for grandness) also emerges from his poems, a collection of which will be published on the occasion of the exhibition. Always on the edge between the quest for the spirituous and the quest for the spiritual, between farce and seriousness, the narrator wanders like a tipsy Parisian pedestrian from “church to bars”, following the whim of his nocturnal itineraries.
Raynald Driez was born in 1974 in Saint-Gilles-Croix-de-Vie, in Vendée. He graduated from the École des beaux-arts in Bordeaux, which he attended from 1994 to 1999. He had several personal exhibitions in France, in particular at the gallery Déborah Zafman and at Polad-Hardouin gallery, in Paris. He has been working for several years as an art teacher for the association La Source, founded by Gérard Garouste.