Jean-Pierre Raynaud

The work

Untitled
1966
23 x 65 x 45 cm
Inset: chipboard covered with water-repellent melamine, flowerpot, cement, debris, paint

The cube, full of cement in various sizes and colours, was Raynaud’s signature. For many years in Paris, on the esplanade in front of the Centre Pompidou, there stood a large white cube topped by Raynaud’s gigantic gilded cube. Until the museum closed in 2025 for renovations, it occupied the fifth floor in a large, floor-to-ceiling display case.
Raynaud has always used objects laden with symbolism, linked to his own life experience. The first was a flowerpot for growing flowers, which he filled with cement as a metaphor for a closed life or memory, in this case, his first profession as a gardener.
The work in the collection was a gift from Raynaud to Stämpfli as a token of friendship after they had taken part together in a double exhibition at the Larcade Gallery in 1966.

The artist

(Courbevoie, France, 1939)

Jean-Pierre Raynaud’s work is characterised by a radical, cold and highly systematic aesthetic that moves between conceptual art and minimalism, but is in fact a very personal form of symbolism tied to his own experience.
The first was a gardening pot for growing flowers, which he filled with cement as a metaphor for a closed life or memory, in this case referring to his first profession as a gardener.
Later, Raynaud adopted the white ceramic tile as his signature. He covered large surfaces with square white tiles, like those used in bathrooms or hospitals, but with black grout and edging. He used this pattern to cover all sorts of everyday objects, sculptures, rooms, containers and even his own house. The repetition of the uniform module evokes ideas of coldness, sterility, order and neutrality, but can also suggest repression or death.
Between 1969 and 1993, he lived in a house completely clad in white tiles: it was both a home and a living work of art. In 1993, he destroyed it himself and exhibited the fragments in containers like a kind of conceptual burial: an action laden with meaning about memory, destruction and symbolic persistence.
His work often conveys a tension between order and repressed emotion, between system and trauma: art as a vital and radical act. It is a work that questions the boundaries between life, space, body, memory and death in a formal inquiry that conceals a powerful symbolic, existential and emotional charge.