The Appart Renoma presents the exhibition “L’Art de la Matière: Gutaï and the post-war Japanese avant-gardes”. This exhibition highlights Maurice Renoma‘s artistic commitment to spontaneous creation and the notion of matter as a means of expression, as well as his Japanese black and white photographs, the “Solitudes”, among the most intimate of his career. We present today the images of Maurice Renoma.
When Maurice Renoma turned to photography, his camera became his accomplice, the witness of his travels around the world. With it, Maurice Renoma captured the moment and created travel diaries in the form of visual notes.
He constantly experiments with this territory in an autodidact approach, on the fringes of artistic currents: cultivating a raw image of his own, he gives shape to the intimate far from the codes of classical representation, hence the hybridization that runs through his work and the application of singular modes of figuration.
During his first stays in Japan, he was touched by the feeling of disarray he perceived in the streets, among the people he met, and felt the need to transpose, even concretize, this vision and these contrasts in images.
He then designed his “Solitudes”, a photographic series among the most intimate of his artistic career, which immortalized his perception of the economic crisis and the social misery of the post-war period in this country which is so dear to him: fleeting figures and distracted, bodies absent from the present moment, solitudes surrounded by crowds.
These black and white shots present a subtle mixture of chance and precision that makes the subjects sink into their individuality, into an almost brutal psychic dimension.
Then, Maurice Renoma pushed the photographic language to its limits, by transforming these images into objects with drawn, hybrid, delicate lines; he thus gives them a tenderness capable of escaping the harshness and putting a distance between the photographer, the scene and the spectator.
Maurice Renoma : Solitudes
from March 15 to April 15, 2023
Appart Renoma
129bis rue de la Pompe
75116 Paris
