From enigma to fantasy, Arnaud Rochard draws his inspiration from an iconographic universe linked to the origin of civilization. Where the cradle of humanity seems to have existed; Creation stricto sensu. The artist's research is driven by a quest, that of a plastic expression imbued with technique and virtuosity awakening the eye to contemplation. The eye intrudes, clears, gets lost then returns to focus, like an explorer handling a telescope. A controlled, dense aesthetic content. Each trace then leads us to another in an initiatory journey projecting into infinity.
Neither quite a painter, nor quite a sculptor, the artist is in the groove of these two techniques. From drawing to engraving, he uses his precise and spontaneous gesture to discover a line. The lines intertwine, the thickness of the line varies and the shapes are drawn in the solids and the voids. Then the color intervenes by play of appearance and disappearance, passing to the surface, by extended or delimited zone in shades of luminosity which exalt the depth. On paper, on linen and on earth, the support is linked to his gesture and vice versa in a disconcerting alchemy. Sometimes left bare, raw, the material is integrated into the composition and intervenes on the surface by superimposing planes.
A process that he declines using motifs and figurative codes composing a panorama made of lush and scattered vegetation reminiscent of the Golden Age. The time of promises and life without constraint like an endless paradise, of an uncolonized virgin land where everything remains to be discovered. But, in this Eden, threatening symbolic figures sometimes emerge, such as armed knights or mythological figures embodied by animals. Creatures, faceless, expressionless, wild, dark, solitary, like so many clues to a past story. Silhouettes that the viewer can identify with. They never invade the perception of the whole subject: Nature and, thereby, the allegory of Freedom.
For this first personal exhibition at the Félix Frachon gallery, Arnaud Rochard transposes us through his paintings, ceramics and monotypes into imagined landscapes where we tame the unexpectedness of the future. That of a fertile humanity where nature never ceases to amaze us with its living and elusive force but which silently shakes up society. A latent atmosphere which, further on, surrounds us around scenes of conquistadors in search of Eldorado, this golden mirage. Two rooms, two points of view which multiply to offer only one representation, a journey into Uchronia.
To fall in love with it, the dream mixes with the nightmare within a chaotic reality which then becomes a receptacle for the imagination.
Maëlle Delaplanche
