Portrait de Romy Schneider

Etudes: licence d'art plastiques, Université de Saint-Denis. école d’art et technologie de l’image, Université de Paris VIII.

The work of Renaud Delorme is based on two fundamental principles: the very particular graphic elaboration of the subject (a portrait of a well-known person or any other popular image) and the use of recycling material.
His favourite subject are famous TV or Hollywood personalities who in some way have meant something special to him. After choosing a photograph in which they are easily identifiable, he starts at the technical stage of his work. By means of computer software he turns the photograph into a black-and-white stylized picture which consists of a regular composition of parallel lines. Subsequently, he reports this computer generated portrait on a large and smooth plexiglass plate by painting it by hand. This transparent plate becomes the lid of a container made of wood and framed with a thin aluminium frame. Finally, he fills up the container with recycling materials of any form, colour and size in order to create contrast and depth within (actually behind) the figure he painted. The result of this gradual and very well thought-out creative progress are colourful but yet extremely illusory pictures which give a different visual effect depending on the distance and the position of the observer.
The other, at least equally impressive, aspect of Renaud Delorme’s work is without any doubt the transformation of old, no longer usable objects into raw material for the creation of valuable pieces of art. Moreover, these “containers” even display their own intrinsic character: they reflect a particular period or a particular field out of our social and technological history, something that reminds to Andy Warhol’s “time-capsules”, trivial cases through which he attempted to immortalize a certain phase of his life.
Thanks to the adoption of this remarkable technique, Renaud Delorme does more than recycling waste objects: he recycles the public identity of the person portrayed and, at the same time, he puts art and his social role as an artist into a wider and therefore very contemporary perspective.

AWARDS:
2000 Prix de l’A.D.A.G.P.
1999 université PARIS-DAUPHINE: eerste prijs van het publiek en eerste prijs van de jury (1er prix du public-1er prix du jury)

Besides the Kneip Luxembourg Collection of Modern and Contemporary art, which counts a large number of Delorme’s work, there are many other private Belgian and foreign collectors.

PUBLICATIONS
Arts-Antiques-Auctions Magazine, 2006
Absolute Art Gallery, 2007
Le Vif, 2007