The GNG Gallery is hosting the “Contact Sheets” exhibition, highlighting the aesthetic approach of Maurice Renoma, artist, and the creative impulse that accompanies his entire life.
Gilles Naudin presents a unique project, designed to investigate the origins of the artist’s creative process and the multiple facets of his personality.
This exhibition will be held on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of Maison Renoma in October 2023.
If the artistic act begins with intention, it is through the gaze and the choice that the author makes on his drafts that we discover the creative process. Maurice Renoma opens his archives and exhibits for the first time his contact sheets, containing photos from the beginning of his photographic practice. This journey in search of his aesthetic becomes for the spectator the reading of real visual notebooks.
The strength of photography arises from the fusion between poetry and reality: Maurice Renoma stages the unknown, experiments without setting limits and likes to be amazed by the results, in a rebellious state of mind impervious to collective norms and values. Presenting a spontaneous and strongly inventive nature, he designs a universe for his own use based on his own impulses.
Failed Photos
Photos taken without intention or thought, accidents of the present.
Maurice Renoma did not create his failed photos to become artistic objects. They are accidents, failed takes which are sometimes the genesis of successful works. These first images capture the movements of life, shadows and bodies. His gesture is automatic and intimate, dedicated to capturing the noise of existence, the forms of emotions, the dimension of missed actions: the blurs created preserve the mystery of individuals and erase the boundaries between fiction and reality, shadow and light, perversions and virtues.
The human body is at the center of his first years of experimentation, marked by a particular interest in the characters – sometimes taken out of their context and restored in an almost cinematographic framework; the images are imbued with sensuality and explore the details of a garment on the body, capturing the charm of a lost gaze or an intimate ritual.
We could call it intimate photography, in which the subjects were photographed in “stolen” moments, before and after the real pose. These are spontaneous images captured in the movement of life, preserving the mystery of individuals and subtracting nothing from the grace or harshness of the moment.
Maurice Renoma : Planches contact
From September 14 to October 28, 2023
Galerie GNG
3, rue Visconti, 75006 Paris
www.galeriegng.com
