Raoul Reynolds: a retrospective

A name that clears your throat, catches your eyes and ends up infiltrating your thoughts. If you have not heard of Raoul Reynolds, that comes as no surprise. In the shadows he remained, in silence. Raoul Reynolds was one of many dark paths in life - despite burning investigation - leave us with countless unanswered questions.

Raoul Reynolds was a pedlar, a confidence trickster, a camelot of art, a storybook character thumbing his nose to a history of a capital. Here we are offered another experience: change the angle and look at the margin. Artist, his default role, he used as a cover for his life of secrets while creating works of art as if they were gateways that would enable him to cross through time. It would be a very good thing if it was going to be so, but it was going to be a little bit more than anything. Alternately a surrealist and a minimalist, he would overcome the most unexpected masks. It was more particularly at the end of his life, though, during exile, that he let himself be indulge totally, undistractedly in art. Here is a retrospective path, a set of works attributed to him, a hypothetical stack where we sometimes give way to doubts, and doubts give way to stories fired by our own fantasies. The exhibition Raoul Reynolds: A retrospective was shown in 2016 at the Glasgow International festival in Scotland and at the Friche la Belle de Mai on the occasion of the Rentree de l'Art Contemporain in Marseille.