Swann Ronné — I Just Need A Sign — Galaxy Museum of Contemporary Art — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Ends in 5 days: July 27 → October 26, 2024

Swann Ronné is a young artist from France who graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2021. In 2022, he received the Roger Bataille Painting Prize. In 2023, he was also awarded the inaugural Zao Wou-Ki Foundation Scholarship, a collaboration with the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris, aimed at promoting the careers of young French and Chinese artists graduating from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris and the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou. He met Huang Zhonghua, the director of the Galaxy Museum of Contemporary Art, during his third-year graduation exhibition at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris.

At Huang Zhonghua’s gracious invitation, he traveled to the distant and rapidly developing Chinese metropolis of Chongqing, a city imbued with fashionable and magical modernity, offering him a brand-new creative experience and emotional journey.

Vue de l’exposition Swann Ronné, I Just Need A Sign, Galaxy Museum of Contemporary Art, Chongqing, Chine © Swann Ronné — Photo : Zhou Hao

Swann’s painting is deeply influenced by the urban visual environment, where various visual perceptions and sensations intersect. Architectural spaces, street advertisements, practical poster designs and shop signs, texts, electronic screens at stations, and any other visible graphic elements all serve as primary sources for his imagery. He extracts sensations from these elements and reconfigures them through his own layout and reconstruction. By using the textures and characters of these images, he transforms recognizable symbols into a new visual language, editing and coding them to create unique urban emotional symbols. These symbols are manifested in textures, colors, drawings, words, letters, and flowing traces.

Vue de l’exposition Swann Ronné, I Just Need A Sign, Galaxy Museum of Contemporary Art, Chongqing, Chine © Swann Ronné — Photo : Zhou Hao

Through the structural relationships between layers, he re-cuts and redraws, making his compositions resemble the interfaces and layouts of designed publications, thereby achieving a new visual effect.

These paintings may look like fleeting graffiti phrases in the city or writing left on a neighborhood wall. They reflect the thoughts and emotions of strangers in the city, embodying their collective physical presence and the youth or life they cherish within. In the visual relationship formed by letters and symbolic sentences, he often adopts a humorous approach. Sometimes, you might feel he is manufacturing his compositions in a procedural manner, rarely showing overly emotional brushstrokes. His painting layers are highly standardized, with the painting’s grammar mainly consisting of collage, cutting, templating, transforming, and editing, closely resembling the style of published visuals. The visual result is a sliding, moving, covering, and disguising between technology and conceptual language.

He believes that the finished image you see is never predetermined; the flow of painting has no set program, allowing the painting to return to the quality of its object. This process offers the artist the possibility of creating a montage, opening a mystical visual door.

Vue de l’exposition Swann Ronné, I Just Need A Sign, Galaxy Museum of Contemporary Art, Chongqing, Chine © Swann Ronné — Photo : Zhou Hao

Chongqing hot pot and the overlapping urban spaces will be the most important heterogeneous images in his bodily memory, both visually and gustatorily. As he progresses, his works improve, and Chongqing welcomes and blesses him. May friendship endure, and may the mysterious door be actively opened.

Curator : Li Yong