ARNAUD ROCHARD
LA MER DES HYSTOIRES

APRIL 27th - JUNE 15th, 2024

Catalogue of Works
Artist’s info
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PARIS-B is delighted to welcome Arnaud Rochard in its PB Project for his solo show entitled « La mer des Hystoires », unveiling his latest works.

“There are artists who spend a lifetime repeating ready-made formulas, pulling the same strings. There are artists who explore and travel beyond the limits they constantly push. Artists who doubt, who question, who take risks. Some go off in all directions, sometimes losing their way. Others manage to maintain a singular identity in their evolution. Something that has always been. Already there. An essence. A block of intensity that remains beyond the formal mutations of the work.

Arnaud Rochard belongs to the second family. The family of free travelers.”

— Amélie Adamo

“The vegetation is lush, almost dissolving the picture. The impression of depth comes from the colored shadows. In vertical formats such as La mer des Hystoires, Arnaud Rochard evokes the work of dominoté paper and its panoramas, the beginnings of wallpaper in the 18^th century.

The landscape extends like a pattern, and therein lies the ambiguity of the artist’s work. If you look closely, you can pick out the detail of a plant, as if taken from a botanical plate, next to the silhouette of a tree, a knight lost in a forest of vines. The juxtaposition and interplay of scales create a visual disorientation between genres. By employing techniques associated with multiples, such as linocut, which he twists into a complex superimposition of layers, the artist creates unique images. He literally exhausts the pattern and makes it his main subject, as in the wallpaper produced with the Antoinette Poisson brand, where the figure of a horseman is repeated to the saturation point. What are the images that remain after having dressed the walls, tapestries and minds for so many centuries? A knowledge of the history of the decorative arts that enables him to develop a pictorial approach that transcends this framework and stands on its own, with all its secrets and unseen aspects.

Whether Arnaud Rochard is exploring azulejos, the Spanish-Portuguese earthenware tiles that first appeared in the 15^th century, or referring to tapestry, leaving the canvas free : he enjoys mixing temporalities.

Eclectic, in the first sense of the word and according to Diderot’s definition of free spirits, he combines in Casa the touch of oil with the frame of linocut to evoke the specificity of patchwork on canvas. Beyond the question of taste, to which the notion of eclecticism was reduced in the 19^th century, he introduces notions of filiation and heritage, of which the half-faded Âge d’or coats of arms are the most visible aspects. This work on the transmission of a visual culture shows the interweaving of different temporalities and geographies.

Extract from the Exhibition text by Henri Guette

This artisanal relationship is reflected in his recent work, which combines painting, ceramics and engraving. Whether linocuts and oils on canvas, xylographs on Japanese paper, ceramics, earthenware and glazed engobes in the spirit of azuléjos: all Arnaud Rochard’s works reflect the same pleasure in working with materials. ”

— Amélie Adamo

“If there’s an already there in Arnaud Rochard’s work, it seems to me that it has to do with the question of time. The time of memory. The time of the body. The time of the image. The time of making.

Arnaud Rochard has always hybridized distorted and metamorphosed elements, deliberately creating an indeterminate temporal universe, at once prehistoric, ancient, medieval and modern. The timeless, indeterminate figures that populate his works come from the artist’s strolls through the world of art and popular culture.

These “phantom” designs are embodied in a handcrafted practice whose slow process tends to erode the picture, making it difficult to read. […]

Like La Mer des histoires, one of the most beautifully illustrated books of the 15^th century, Arnaud Rochard works with fragments that he assembles and compiles. In this chronicle of the late Middle Ages, different types of texts and narratives blend together, poetry and prose, history and fiction, to redraw a genealogy of the world, and the image itself participates in this undertaking, notably with a number of cartographies. The artist places himself in this same position, with variations in style and playing on existing narratives and their counter-narratives.

Arnaud Rochard likes to refer to authors of fairy tales and parables like Salman Rushdie; like them, he leads us to look elsewhere, and perhaps to sketch out other possibilities.”

Extract from the Exhibition text by Henri Guette

Catalogue of Works

BIOGRAPHY

Arnaud Rochard graduated from the École Européenne Supérieure d’Art de Bretagne. He lives and works in the region of Bretagne, France where he develops interdisciplinary work between engraving – in all its forms -, painting, and drawing. In 2018, he received the grant of creation from DRAC Pays de Loire and, in 2019, the Pierre Cardin Prize for engraving from the Académie des Beaux Arts.

Know more about the artist

ARNAUD ROCHARDLA MER DES HYSTOIRES

APRIL 27th - JUNE 15th, 2024

Catalogue of Works

BIOGRAPHY​

ARNAUD ROCHARD

PARIS·B

ARNAUD ROCHARD
LA MER DES HYSTOIRES

BIOGRAPHY