Raymond Reynaud

Raymond Reynaud was born on October 8, 1920 in Salon-de-Provence, into a family of small grain traders.

At the age of 14 he became an apprentice house painter. At the same time, he attended evening classes at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Salon. At that time he painted mostly landscapes and still lifes which did not completely satisfy him. It is too ordinary a painting which "closes the doors to the imagination" and which lacks creativity and improvisation. During the war he was interested in popular music and in the Liberation he created an Orchestra musette.

After collecting enough money, at the age of 28, Raymond settled in Sénas to work as a painter.

In 1950 he began a first plastic arts internship with artists from the Paris school and in 1952 he founded “Arts Plastiques des Alpilles” a research group in Salon-de-Provence.

Six years later, feeling himself trapped in a system, he stopped painting for a long time. Because of heart problems Raymond Raynaud can no longer work and knows depression but, thanks to Arlette, his great love, he will succeed in overcoming his problems and in 1968 he will definitively resume painting, following the discovery of the naive Yugoslavs. Freed from the authority and artifice of his academic artistic training, he begins a new artistic research which leads him to a new imaginary world. In search of an inner truth Raymond produces a dense work in perpetual mutation. It portrays universal themes, legends and subjects linked to political consciousness.

A completely personal language, Raymond's paintings are distinguished by their symmetries, their geometrizations and fragmentations of space.

The structure, which is the basis of his work, only becomes the support of an original and undisciplined force which dominates the entire painting.

Raymond Raynaud chooses to keep the organic unity of his work, transforming his house into a refuge for his artistic production. In 1977 he opened a painting workshop for adults in Salon-de-Provence, the Green Quiconce, encouraged by Jean Dubuffet and Michel Thévoz. The workshop will be very successful but will be dissolved only in 1990.

In 2007 he died a few days before the inauguration of his retrospective held at the Château de l'Empéri, in Salon-de-Provence.