Loïc RAGUÉNÈS

Raguénès was born in Besançon in 1968.

He studied at the Besançon fine arts school, then in Nîmes, but it was in the studio of an artist that he developed his relationship with painting, placed under the sign of 'a frank obstinacy and few compromises. By spending two years with the painter Rémy Zaugg (he is sometimes also described as a conceptual artist) in the concrete cube constituting his studio designed by Herzog & de Meuron, Loïc Raguénès certainly learned the absolute requirement: that that Zaugg put into creating his screen prints on lacquered aluminum, but also that of his merciless relationship with art, starting with his own.

These paintings, in fact, are not really monochrome: Loïc Raguénès paints in tempera, a technique which refers to Byzantine icons or the painting of Fra Angelico.

In the 2000s, his work took the form of drawings made in pencil, made up of dots colored in a single color: this handicap then became his exclusive language. It was then obvious that Raguénès had a very particular sense of color and choice of images: he could apply this treatment to a scene from Eyes Wide Shut as well as to a group of pink flamingos, a sprig of lily of the valley or a painting by Fra Angelico. “The monochrome rendering of the drawings as well as its decomposition into half-tone frames accentuates the abstract dimension of the image. Once transformed into monochrome, the images become foreign to the truth, they are then like ghosts of four-color images,” writes art critic Vincent Pécoil on this subject.

text by Éric Troncy - 

https://www.numero.com/fr/art/loic-raguenes-monochromes-vague-tempera-myrtille-ruine-de-rome#:~:text=Ragu%C3%A9n%C3%A8s%20est%20n%C3%A9%20%C3%A0%20Besan%C3%A7on,et%20de%20peu%20de%20compromis.