Dimanche Matin (2023) Photography by Vivien Raynal

"Vivien Raynal is a total artist. Coming from a family of artists, he grew up in the south of France. If music won his heart in the early years of his life, it is drawing and cinema that have always fascinated him. Musician, author and composer, he travels the world and falls in love with images, moods, atmospheres and artificial or gloomy lights. He is passionate about others, in their faults, by projecting his own flaws.

Meditation and the exploration of altered states of consciousness have generated in Vivien Raynal an obsession with time, the present and liminal spaces. The vertigo caused by infinity is a fascinating vibration, like the immensity of emptiness. He then becomes aware that the image creates a new temporality because it frees itself from time and that he will then be able to express himself fully through this prism.

Vivien Raynal's work is neither confined to a technique nor to a discourse. It opens the doors to an imagination that is both intimate and universal. Solitude as an inspiration towards offbeat universes, marked by marginality.

Inspired by the disturbing atmospheres of the world's big cities, he is fascinated by dilapidated urban areas, isolated roadsides and kitsch and disturbing interiors... these places, built by men and then abandoned like this, are only a reflection of the fragility of a system.

The obvious aesthetic of his works emerges through the use of deliberately acidulous colours, as well as the stripping down and purification of the image. These processes create a discrepancy with the singularity of the subject: his compositions praise the ugliness and madness, the dirt and sordidness of humanity.

Perfection does not exist in man. Behind each one, there is a shameful part of oneself that we hide and which, however, transpires from each of us. It is the fragility of man, his faults, his perversions, his excesses, which make him a human being.

In a redemptive approach, he rehabilitates the human being, restoring his nobility: we are all fragile."

Laetitia Deloustal, Doctor of History and Art History, October 2023

• Nationality: FRANCE
• Date of birth : 1980
• Artistic domains: Works by professional artists, Represented by a Gallery,
• Groups: Professional Artist Contemporary French Artists Artists presented by a gallery