Jacques Renoir Canal à Venise, 2018

Jacques Renoir: The Double Call
Jacques is my husband. He asks me to write a text about his work. More precisely on this exhibition, Eaux vives, the photographs of which I know well from having seen them in his studio or in the field being taken.
I agree straight away, even though I am in a doubly awkward position as the photographer's wife and exhibition participant. We have indeed produced a joint work, a photography-poetry diptych.

To him the images, to me the words. This work is Le Lac.
I agree straight away because I love what he does. And how he does it. But also because it is an opportunity for me to take a different look at his images, no longer contemplative but analytical. And in its own way, in accordance with this “beyond the gaze” to which Jacques claims to be. I have all of his Eaux Vives in front of me. I detail them at length.

It seems to me that there is a double appeal in his photographs which one could take as contradictory if one did not experience the intensity. This double call is that of fixity and movement, of instant and duration, of suspense and course. In short, that of a static and a dynamic.
I look at the photograph of the children jumping in the jets of water. A freeze frame. A momentum that continues beyond the image. The stop does not block anything. On the contrary, it exhibits with surprising precision what the eye cannot grasp: the breaking of each drop of water in the verticality of a jet. But this compelling attention to presence is combined with an impetuosity that nothing can prevent. However, this is a constant in Jacques' photographic practice.
Explore a point of view by varying techniques, perspectives, lights, colors, until you find this deep point which is the birth of a new visibility. And launch it in its own movement.
Obviously he never quit his profession as a filmmaker, even in photography. On the contrary. He sublimates it there.

This is noticeable in that each of his images, he says intentionally, tells a story. Whether it is a unique photograph like that of a tiny couple on a beach, between pebbles and water, of the Promenade des Anglais, or whether it is in the choice of a series of associated photographs, in two, three, five, or even twelve images as for Le Lac. In the unique photograph, it is the detail that upsets the flat areas of the seascape and suggests listening to an intimate exchange. In the case of series, as for example in the three photographs of Harlem in the rain, it is the fight that is captured, in street scenes where passers-by fight against a downpour.
In the twelve photographs of the Lake, it is, shot after shot, the slow coming of the storm falling on its own reflection on the surface of a lake.

However, I believe that his relationship with cinema is strongest when all of his unique or paired photographs are themselves staged around a theme. This indeed allows him to embrace in a unique and superior movement all the variations he wishes. This kinetics of kinetics is no longer simply narrative but existential because it includes all possibilities. The Eaux vives are thus circumscribed, as if by a circular camera, and they are enumerated in joie de vivre, in splashes, in threat of storms, in search of shelter, in peaceful contemplation, in the rustling of a stream. However, the double call does not sound less so far. For, in its strength and its paradox, the embracing movement penetrates matter and finds there a static essentiality, bordering on abstraction. Right at the limit. It is she who seizes in the sheaves of Storm Alex the elemental power of water, superior to all humanity. Or in the sumptuousness of the colors of disaster, the deep green of deadly waters.
Claude Montserrat-Renoir, philosopher, Nice, November 2020