Organza I, 2024

Virginie Renard-von Rakowski  

Born in 1964, the Franco-Swiss Virginie Renard-von Rakowski is a painter and spiritual guide (accompagnante spirituelle). After studying painting in a Parisian studio, she graduated from ESAM and became an architectural colorist in 1987. She began her career in an architectural firm before teaching painting in France and abroad. She also created illustrations for theological works and participated in painting workshops for training seminars and corporate events until 2004. From 2004 to 2012, she dedicated herself to liturgical paintings and sacred art, exhibiting notably in Italy and France. Since 2012, her daily life has been devoted to spiritual guidance in hospital settings, specifically in oncology and palliative care departments. For her, this space of listening and presence is a secret, invisible, and intimate garden, where the Being, in its vulnerability, reveals a silent beauty.

This experience nourishes her work. The oil on canvas probes the invisible territories of the soul. Inspired by the seasons of nature as much as by those of inner life, she explores the boundary between the visible and the invisible. Through an artistic expression that oscillates between figurative and abstraction, she opens pathways to intimate places where memory, poetry, and light unfold, like a breath offered to the gaze upon contact with nature and animals. Her encounter with black-headed sheep breeders has become a new field of pictorial exploration.