Motel Réflexion, 2022

Vivien Raynal  

Vivien Raynal is a complete artist. Born into a family of artists, he grew up in the south of France. While music won his heart in his early years, it is drawing and cinema that have always been his passions. A musician, author, and composer, he travels the world and is captivated by images, moods, atmospheres, and artificial or gloomy lighting. He is fascinated by others, with their flaws, projecting his own vulnerabilities onto them.

Meditation and the exploration of altered states of consciousness instilled in Vivien Raynal an obsession with time, the present, and liminal spaces. The vertigo provoked by infinity is a fascinating vibration, like the immensity of the void. He then became aware that the image creates a new temporality because it emancipates itself from time, and that he would henceforth be able to fully express himself through this prism.

Vivien Raynal's work is neither confined to a single technique nor to a single discourse. It opens the doors to an imagination that is both intimate and universal. Solitude serves as inspiration, leading to offbeat universes imbued with marginality and tinged with madness.

Inspired by the unsettling atmospheres of the world's great cities, he is fascinated by dilapidated urban areas, isolated roadsides and kitschy, disturbing interiors… these places, built by men and then abandoned, are merely a reflection of the fragility of a system.

The striking aesthetic of his works emerges from the use of deliberately vibrant colors, as well as the starkness and purity of the image. These techniques create a contrast with the singularity of his subject matter: his compositions celebrate ugliness and madness, the filth and sordidness of humanity.

Perfection does not exist in man. Behind each of us lies a shameful part of ourselves that we conceal, yet which nevertheless seeps through each of us. It is man's fragility, his flaws, his perversions, his deviations, that make him human.

In a redemptive approach, he rehabilitates humanity, restoring its nobility: we are all fragile.

Text by Laetitia Deloustal, PhD in History and Art History, October 2023