Dear Shaded Viewers,
A year after the start of the war in Ukraine, the artist Jean-Pierre Raynaud presented this Friday at La Sorbonne, in Paris, a
painting designed as a response to “Guernica” by Pablo Picasso, painted during the Spanish Civil War. It is a huge painting 7.77
meters long by 3.49 meters wide, which shows two no entry signs and two black lines crossing the canvas. It is the work of Jean-Pierre
Raynaud, an artist known in particular for his giant pots exhibited in particular at the Center Pompidou or for the house he designed in La
Garenne-Colombes, the Mastaba 1. A response to war This untitled painting, unveiled Friday in the main courtyard of La Sorbonne in
Paris – and which will remain there for two months, shares with the famous “Guernica”, by Pablo Picasso, two things. On the one
hand its dimensions, which are strictly identical, on the other hand a context of creation in times of war. In 1937, Picasso made Guernica in
response to the violence of the Spanish Civil War. In 2023, Jean-Pierre Raynaud left the war in Ukraine to create his
installation, at the invitation of a contemporary art publisher.
Later,
Marco de Rivera