Renaud Regnery’s Post-Future!/!Past-Exotic Viet Cong
by Robert Hobbs
Renaud Regnery’s recent digital-collage paintings critique aspects of mid-twentieth-century
American abstract expressionism, even as they redirect some of this art’s stylistic conventions to entirely
different ends. In his paintings, Regnery demonstrates how the artist comprises only one constituent
(albeit necessary) material/element for creation among many others, which then come together to effect
the qualitative emergence of a distinctly new invention, so that they work in concert with the substantially
more realistic views of people as produced by the specific cultures in which they live, and not its
producers.
Although Regnery’s paintings might at first appear to be ratifying the ideals and attitudes of such
mid-twentieth-century American abstract expressionists as Willem de Kooning (1904!–1997) and Lee
Krasner (1908!–1984), their apparent similarity is based on critical instead of emulative relations, ironic
rather than deferential attitudes, and analytical not spontaneous creations. Regnery’s paintings look at such
late romantic views of reified artistic individuality whereby the artist’s mind (Aristotle’s form at work) is
active and matter passively receives its stamp as an improbable and out-of-sync hylomorphism.
Consequently, his approach no longer supports the abstract expressionists’ insistence on art as an accurate
and tangible means for recording distinct subjectivities.
Replacing this out-of-date glorification of the artist as form giver, Regnery works with a view of
creativity informed in part by the recently revived theories of French philosopher Gilbert Simondon
(1924!–1989), pertaining to a vital individuation as a qualitative and quantum collaborative leap in which
matter, in turn, informs the mind, making artists more collaborators with their chosen media than its
initiators, thereby joining all of art’s constituent elements into overlapping images of a continuous system
of dynamic and ontic becoming, rather than static records of one particular type of being.i
In addition to deflecting the abstract expressionists’ truisms about the artist as sole originator of
form and the origination of art’s meaning, Regnery’s collage paintings move beyond these American
artists’ deepest-seated fears that their highly abstract paintings might be no more meaningful than colorful
wallpaper. In recent years, he has in fact initiated his works with exactly this type of wall covering.
Regarding wallpaper and its artistic possibilities, Regnery notes:
Beyond the modernist discussion about ornament and, to put it simply, the permanent
tension between William Morris’ political meanings of using crafts and Adolf Loos’
famous essay, Ornament and Crime, I consider the older fashion for scenic tropical
wallpapers in the nineteenth century also very interesting. People used to cover their walls
with visuals from places they fantasized about.ii
Unlike the abstract expressionists who considered wallpapers as mere wall decor and their largescale abstract canvases’ possible nemesis, Regnery regards this commercially produced material as
specialized examples of a technological becoming. This becoming assumes a highly conventionalized and
yet, eminently ideological mode, capable of documenting, in an exceedingly decorative format, some of
the most acculturated feelings from a particular time period. In an effort to create an ongoing ontogenesis
in his art, Regnery considers each wallpaper to constitute a particularly useful representation of an
established state of being that he then merges with others, such as scanned images of his fingers
manipulating his iPhone. These works then actualize Simondon’s theory of an ontology of relations in
which the processes of becoming appear to be privileged over static images of being, as well as his view
of transindividuality as joining interior (psychic) and exterior (collective) individuations.
As Regnery has explained, “The question of individuation is a crucial issue of our lives in today’s
society: How to develop singularities in a context of standardization of behaviors and lifestyles?”iii Rather
than attempt to break out of all established norms to create a totally new world!– which interpretative
semiotics, with its ability to discover legibility in even the most incomprehensible signs, seems to have
decreed an impossibility, Regnery chooses to begin with socially encoded givens as the basis for a series
of actions, largely rehearsed on the computer to create qualitatively original hybrids and variations on
established themes. If the new and arresting inventions comprising his works are cogent enough,
sufficiently powerful enough, and thoroughly integrated enough to create arresting tensions bespeaking
an ideal space, then these new inventions will move beyond their tacit subjects (including the wallpaper
with which he starts and the evocative and unconventional materials he uses), to “break the monopoly of
established reality,”iv as the Frankfort School Marxist Herbert Marcuse so cogently explains, by
comprising a different ideology from ensconced ones, thereby providing the opportunity for viewers to
separate themselves from their culture’s dominate worldviews by presenting them with new possible
ones.v According to Marcuse, this potential incongruity can become a decisive means for critiquing a
given reality if art’s invention of qualitative new forms is understood as being at odds with it.
Although Regnery does deconstruct certain aspects of abstract expressionism, he works
intuitively, to develop new and discontinuous energy fields. Consequently, he has only suggested the
ramifications of the process his art evidences, particularly its semantic options, implications, and effects.
Even though he initiates each of his works by looking at the once-feared equation, abstraction equals
decoration, that concerned the most intrepid abstract expressionists, Regnery has not attempted to play the
art historical endgame of underscoring such anxieties about attractive nonrepresentational surfaces as
baseless apprehensions.
Because of his background growing up in Épinal, France, a town famous since the nineteenth
century for popular-culture images produced by the Imagerie d’Épinal company (formerly Imagerie
Pellerin), which were embraced by such eminent painters as Gustave Courbetvi among others, Regnery
has found mid-twentieth-century commercially produced wallpaper to be a very specific type of
vernacular as well as a remarkable cultural type of seismograph capable of indirectly recording social and
historical changes in low-key albeit distinct ways for those who take the time to study them seriously.
Recently, he has been working with re-editioned and retro-designed (fake vintage) wall coverings from
the 1970s, which he discovered at Flavor Paper in Brooklyn, New York. Earlier he has used foil and flock
wallpapers produced by General Tire in the ’60s as well as wall coverings manufactured and/or distributed
by the UK-based firm Shand Kydd and a German one called Marburg. Although he takes these papers
from the commercial world, he subjects them to a series of transformations:
The analog material (vintages stuff, found covering) is scanned (sometimes after it has
been altered) and manipulated with Photoshop before being re-printed. There is an
important amount of time spent on the computer to transform these yet digitalized
elements, and to define a pre-image of the whole, to which I’ll try to take the real
painting.vii
Suffused with the ideological, and thus naturalized conventions of high art modernism (op art and
hard-edge abstraction) and romantic idealism (evidenced by semi-handmade bamboo and naturalistic
patterns), several of Regnery’s preferred wall coverings for this exhibition at Klemms’ Gallery have been
selected because they indirectly allude to the war in Vietnam. Rather than point directly to the war in
Vietnam, they aestheticize aspects of it by reformulating the once feared alien other, the Viet Cong, as
merely exotic. In this way these wallpapers bring the war home, but they do so by domesticating it it as
oriental, calling to mind the soothing aura of Indochine rather than the tense blatancy of Vietnam. In this
way, Renaud’s work comments on the brash collages House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home (c. 1967–
72) by noted political artist Martha Rosler, who cross-referenced images of Vietnam warfare with U.S.
advertisements picturing upscale domestic interiors. Regnery’s selection of ideological aestheticizations
found in commercial-grade wallpaper, a new becoming in Simondon’s view, taking place both during and
after France’s and the U.S.’s long wars with North Vietnam, is one of the more recent in a long series of
post-war exoticisms!–!reaching as far back as the ancient Greeks and the Persians and possibly even before
then!–!that served to wallpaper (i.e., cover over both figuratively and literally) any residual difficulties
remaining from the armed conflicts.
While many abstract expressionists embraced the aesthetics of the palimpsest as a cogent symbol
for the workings of the many layers of the subconscious mind, Regnery relies on this metaphoric structure
as a way to incorporate different times and velocities in his works, making them compelling references to
an ongoing ontogenesis as well as sets of ruins capable of alluding to multiple events that spatialize
history at the same time they temporalize space.viii He has summarized his process in the following way:
My collaged paintings join these elementary practices together with the use of computer
layering and modeling softwares to compound and challenge cultural references,
associations, and signifiers seen through the lens of the digital age of ambiguity in which
we live.ix
Regnery thus purposefully builds up and erodes layers of paint and other substances over
wallpaper backgrounds to create the effects of time’s accrual, so that his works become virtual
archaeological charts. In consideration of this challenge, Regnery’s decision to use the term Viet Cong as
the generic title for this group of paintings has to be understood as polyvalent and even highly ironic,
particularly since members of this group entered the non-historic past after the Vietnamese war. As he has
explained:
Viet Cong represents many other meanings than the name given by a military group to a
specific enemy. Beyond the political, it stands independently in the collective imagination.
The term is layered with both associations with danger or fear in front of the unknown, an
othering, and fascination or exoticism of it, and the distance we now have or don’t have to
this topic makes it hard to take a position. Using it as a title can be inflammatory towards
some and satirical to others. Therefore I think it’s a good one.”x
He reinforces the idea of the passage of time to thematize ongoing change in this series of
paintings, thus creating allagmatic modalities that contribute to the art object’s continued genesis by
employing such materials as copper powder, allowed to oxidize into a copper sulfate in one painting
where it overlaps a print of vernacular food on shiny foil; puffing-ink to create a soft relief on burned
surfaces in another work; and iron powder in yet another, where it is encouraged to rust into a rich patina
over an underlying surface of bamboo wallpaper.
Rather than adhere to the abstract expressionists’ belief in the artist’s touch as an indelible mark of
individuality, so that the work is a testament to a series of enacted historic presences and thus tragically
an overall record of their subsequent absence, Regnery’s silk-screens document a series of already
mediated and enlarged photographed images of his own iPhone manipulations to form giant fingerprints
or footprints, constituting yet another ontic register in some of his paintings as if these works somehow
had been subjected to the stamp of a mythic colossus. These oversize markings parody the power of the
artist’s touch since they have been mediated through photography before being silkscreened in materials
that remain responsive to time: iron oxide rusts, and a variety of organic substances, including even
animal blood, which Regnery has noted was employed in Paleolithic wall paintings,xi !are employed to
enact the process of a dynamic ontology or transindividuality!–!Simondon’s word for the ongoing changes
occurring to his paintings.
The importance of his Viet Cong series goes far beyond any deconstructive emendations of
American abstract expressionism since these works serve as a new imaginary for painting as an ironic
medium responsive to changes enacted by the ideologies of exoticism, the artist’s indelible touch, and
progress. This series does so by metaphorically adopting the topos of Simondon’s qualitative invention as
the basis for a new order of being, founded on both the pathos of ruins and ongoing change. Instead of
continuing to invoke the attraction of eighteenth-century ruins with their acquiescence to nature’s slow
decay, Regnery’s paintings critique modernity’s progressive ethos through allusions to superannuated
wallpapers and the transformation (but not decomposition) of his organic materials, as well as his
subscription to postindustrial rust. Even more importantly, his way of working sets the stage for a number
of competing possible compositional options (states of being) on the computer not only for each layer but
also for the overall completed work, which pulls these elements together into a qualitative whole. Since
Regnery prefers not to develop a series of paintings based on one compositional idea, his completed work
can be regarded as both the culmination of a much longer digital process and also a ruin that alludes to a
rich number of possibilities. As Regnery has observed:
A cultural mash up is occurring when an Austrian Alpine village like Hallstadt can be
cloned in the province of Guangdong, China, and IKEA sells Donald Judd-style furniture.
My work examines the uncontainable corruption of knowledge and potentials within the
information feedback loop to reveal complex elements about changing historical meanings
in the human psyche.xii
We can beneficially think of Regnery’s multi-layered works as enacting tears in the ideological
fabric of the modern era since they focus on the superannuated designs of his selected wallpaper as well as
his digital explorations and choice of unconventional painting materials as refuse left in progress’s everrenewing wake. While their ostensible exoticism is certainly founded on designs and attitudes that
aestheticize aspects of South Asia and that rely as well on a mid-twentieth-century raucous op-art and
hard-edge geometric futurism, the paintings’ far more tacit exoticism is to be found in the subtle manner
in which these works hint at different historical pasts while comprising a continuous ongoing ontogenesis
without ever fully representing these different states!–!thereby keeping their suggestive references just
beyond viewers’ reach so that these percipients are encouraged to imaginatively fill in the many blanks,
gaps, and fissures between the layers of references these works so poignantly suggest.
[©Robert Hobbs]
i
Renaud Regnery, “Email to Author, August 30, 2013. Renaud writes, “Yes, I am quite
fond of Simondon’s work about the question of individuation. As you probably know, his work is
an important reference to Deleuze, and an inspiration for his interesting but very complex text
Difference and Repetition, which I also sometimes try to consult.” Writing modestly in this same
email, Renaud notes, “It would be too didactic to pretend that there is a similar process [to
Simondon’s individuality] structuring the way I work. But these phenomena are those which
interest me and that I try to implement, to instigate the imagination and the invention of an
assistance, which I am the first representative to each step of the making of a painting.” This
past year, Regnery read Simondon’s Imagination et Invention. This theorist’s work is only now
being translated into English. An excellent overview in English is provided by Muriel Combes,
Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual, trans., Thomas LaMarre
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2012. A brief yet insightful view of the significance and
relevancy of Simondon’s work can be found in Arne De Boever, Alex Murray, and Jon Roffe,
Technical Mentality; Revisited: Brian Massumi on Gilbert Simondon, Parrhesia 7 (2009): 36– 45,
http://www.parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia07/parrhesia07_massumi.pdf.
ii
Renaud Regnery, Email to Author, August 12, 2013.
iii
Renaud Regnery, Email to Author, August 30, 2013.
iv
Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1977), p. 6.
v
Although Marcuse refers to art’s beauty as ideological and thereby political because it
suggests utopian realms out of sync with established norms, any art that differs from accepted
ideological truisms is capable of creating a strategic break by permitting viewers to perceive the
artificiality and arbitrariness of their naturalized world.
vi
Cf. Meyer Schapiro, Courbet and Popular Imagery: An Essay on Realism and Naïvete,
Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 4, No. 3/4 (April, 1941–July, 1942): 164–191.
vii
Renaud Regnery, Email to Author, August 29, 2013.
viii
The inspiration for my phrase comes from Andreas Huyssen’s important essay Nostalgia
for Ruins, Grey Room No. 23 (Spring, 2006), p. 18 where he discusses the spatialization of
history and the temporalization of space.
ix
Renaud Regnery, Klemm’s Gallery Press Release for Viet Cong (September 14–
October 26, 2013), p. 1.
x
Renaud Regnery, Email to Author, August 12, 2013.
xi
Renaud Regnery, Email to Author, August 27, 2013.
xii
Renaud Regnery, Klemm’s Gallery Press Release for Viet Cong (September 14–
October 26, 2013), p. 1.
Editor: KLEMM’S, Berlin. Text: Robert Hobbs. Photography: Ludovic Jecker.
Design: mischen. © 2013: the artist, the author and the gallery