It seemed to me that Baron-Renouard’s canvas were as much poetic internal landscapes, landscapes wandered by effluvium where force, mystery, panic are combined with dream, with tenderness, with human brainpower in quest of unity, pacificatory union. A kind of extasy-exaltation in view of the Nature, which will be turned into pictorial action.
Later, I met the artist. After having appreciated the work, I enjoyed having an esteem for the man. I learnt from him the affection he had vowed to the memory of this tutelary grandfather, the painter-engraver Paul Renouard, ancestry which urged him, to a great extent, to choose his way. I learnt one thing more about his participation as an aviator officer, during the last war, at North-Africa campaign, Alsace and Germany. I had already known about his multiple social activities, his devotion for art and artists cause, about the responsability he had been assuming.
Baron-Renouard’s painting is, above all, a vibrating space where the first feelings he had in view of the Nature, of its spectacle, hidden, in the subconciousness, are projected inequivaience through forms and colours after the «psychical activity» had processed them in its laboratory.
The approach is at the same time, ample, soft, free and sometimes with a hidden violence. Violence contained in the unifying harmony of graphic and chromatic elements. Colours are in motion, are organized, are spread over like musical subjects. They are orchestrated. They turn into timbres, these timbres react on each other before melting away in the general song of the composition. Baron-Renouard does not deny the affective link between his work and music.
The painting of Baron-Renouard having crossed the hidden internal frontier, offers generously to our eyes the profoundness, the brightness of a CERTAINTY.
Andre Verdet
Writer
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