Patrick Raynaud was born in Carcassone in 1946. From 1964 to 1966 he studied Modern Literature at the University of Toulouse; and from 1967 to 1970 he attended the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques (IDHEC), Paris. Afterwards he worked almost exclusively in film. He lives in Paris.
In the 1980s, alongside his continuing work in film, Raynaud started to create flat figures and houses made from wooden boards. At the same time he began to take a great interest in the container as an art object. In order to address three issues – the context in which a work of art is presented (in particular, contemporary sculpture), the art market, and art history – Raynaud displayed crates of the sort used for the transportation of art works. These contained large illuminated ciba-chrome photographs of celebrated works of Classical Modernism. A related approach to the same themes is reflected in other groups of works from the early 1980s, in which Raynaud drew a parallel between the display of the relics of saints in reliquary caskets and the positive revaluation of works of art through the style of their presentation. Illuminated cibachrome photographs of the life-size bodies of naked, sleeping male figures cocooned in velvet or in various packing materials, were placed in transportation crates made of wood and metal. Similar motifs are to be found in some of Raynaud’s transparent, illuminated colourful neon crates. Raynaud has also treated the theme of the transience of the human body in a series of works in which he placed large-scale photographs of parts of the skin surface in a series of small, illuminated plastic tanks linked together by coloured neon tubes.
www.ftn-books.com has several Patrcik Raynaud titles available.
