The Scarcity of Miracle

Gérard RANCINAN
Caroline GAUDRIAULT

They propose a journey through a selection of their works and projects in which the real and the unreal confront one another at every step. The issue at hand is our perception of a society, of a photograph, of the meaning of a word. They address this question from a poetic point of view by calling upon childhood, the past, emotion, and memory, upon everything that fashions the reality of the present.

The Exhibition
Man invents an unreality for himself in order to survive the real.

GÉRARD RANCINAN – CAROLINE GAUDRIAULT

Man invents an unreality for himself in order to survive the real.

The artist-photographer, Gérard Rancinan, and the author, Caroline Gaudriault, replied to the Submarine Base’s invitation by giving meaning to this place of memory, the primary function of which has been changed. They propose a journey through a selection of their works and projects in which the real and the unreal confront one another at every step. The issue at hand is our perception of a society, of a photograph, of the meaning of a word. They address this question from a poetic point of view by calling upon childhood, the past, emotion, and memory, upon everything that fashions the reality of the present. They also address it from an essentially political perspective by evoking the misappropriation of the real, the voluntary transposition of iconography, and the transformation of language and sound.

This journey includes installations, photographs, texts, videos, sonic recordings and a film.
These various approaches converge on a permanent questioning of our realities, realities that fashion a society built on fantasies and illusions by which it is urgent not to be duped.

***

THE JOURNEY

The journey begins with basins emptied of their submarines, in the chaos of the world.

Like an Opera of the Unreal, the memory of what came before resonates in this place, where the sound of bombs is combined with the divine voice of Maria Callas. The Party’s Over, a monumental photographic work on canvas, spares us nothing of brutal reality and the sweet paradises of our imagination.

The first alcoves stamped with traces of the past are full of our reminiscences. What is unforgettable? What selection is to be made between collective and individual history? An artist’s journey begins at the point to which he has been led by the dreams of which he is made.

Fragments of The Trilogy of the Moderns (2007-2012) speak of the devotees of Modernity, who attempt, in their quest to reinvent the present, to wipe out all heritage, adjudging it to be too heavy to bear. Through impertinence and humour, eschewing moral judgment and peremptory exposition, the Trilogy mocks the excesses of new pecuniary mythologies, ridicules illusions that have become deadly and dictatorial, and derides social schizophrenia. The virtual is totally accepted in contemporary society, but does it always create dreams?

The Destiny of Men (2015) speaks of the human vocation to imitate the angels, to surpass, sublimate and transcend ourselves. If Men are the only creatures equipped with so much imagination, they use it with genius to conceive inventions worthy of their creativity. This is where the struggle starts, a struggle internal but eternal. Light coexists with darkness; creation is juxtaposed to self-destruction. No Man escapes his nature, whether beneficent or nefarious.

Portraits of artists (1972-2016) appeals to the notion of performance to present those individuals who project themselves most frequently into the world’s abstraction through the voluntary creative act of becoming not just men and women, but cultural references. Iconographic representation becomes as important as the work created, giving these artists an eternal status.

A Small Man in a Big World (2013-2014) plunges miniscule Man into the invariable geometry of the world. New biological and nanotechnological territories open up before him. His very identity is called into question by his political and ethical choices, his promethean, transhumanist desires. Sometimes it is more difficult for him to ask the right questions than to find instant answers. Will, when his identity is confronted by the world’s virtuality, always have the independence of mind to ask what reality is ?

We have created libraries in which the artist places his photographic encounters, like kisses stolen from history. The real stories of great personages have given way to iconographic fantasies. They have gone beyond the shores of oblivion and reached those of eternity.

Only the instant is real; the past is subject to the deformation of memory. The last recess represents the present instant. In this “reconstituted office” of the artist and the author, a sort of gallimaufry of their ideas, we find a collection of items that have influenced their lives and itineraries, serving as source material for their uninterrupted conversation about the state of the world. It speaks of inspiration as an immaterial gift of thought, with its fragility, lived experiences, ideas, beliefs and encounters. This is what they pin to the wall: everything that gives meaning to their work.

The journey continues with an installation about sonic memories of the past.

Photographs

The Trilogy of the Moderns


The Raft of Illusions - 2008 - Metamorphoses


The Big Supper - 2008 - Metamorphoses


Freedom unveiled - 2008 - Métamorphoses


The Maids of Honor - 2008 - Metamorphoses


The Dance - 2008 - Metamorphoses


The Garden of Delirium - 2008 - Metamorphoses


Birth & Death - The Circle of Life - 2008 - Metamorphoses


The Martyr - 2009 - Hypotheses

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Family Watching TV - 2011 - Wonderful World


Salome in Wonderland - Detail 2 - 2011 - Wonderful World


My Life on the Web - 2012 - Wonderful World


RIOTS - 2012 - Wonderful World


Batman Family Boys - 2011 - Wonderful World


Batman Family Girls - 2011 - Wonderful World


On The Way Back from Disneyland - 2011 - Wonderful World


Le Banquet des Idoles - 2012 - Wonderful World

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The Destiny Of Men


The Guide - 2014 - The Destiny Of Men


The Warrior - 2014 - The Destiny Of Men


Land of men - 2014 - The Destiny Of Men


Bird of Life - 2014 - The Destiny Of Men


The Annunciation - 2015 - The Destiny Of Men


Market scene - 2014 - The Destiny Of Men


The party is over - 2014 - The Destiny Of Men


The feast of crumbs - 2014 - The Destiny Of Men

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Artists


Triptych Yan Pei Ming - 2003 / 2006 / 2009


Paul Mc Carthy - 2001


Zhang Huan - 2009


Franko B - 2001


Ming in War - 2012

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A Small Man in a Big World


Triptych A small Man in a big world - 2013


The Runner - 2013


The Labyrinthe - 2013


The dance of the fool - 2013

Texts

Alcôve

Listen to the chaos of the world. The Opera of the Unreal. Sounds arrive from afar, like memories, noises of bombs combined with the divine voice of Maria Callas, where tragedy and beauty are rendered possible, where the night never ends. Music is, like the past, abstract. Nothing is real anymore. Besides, you saw nothing in Hiroshima …

***

The black board

Memory is but distortion. Our childhood bedroom turns out to be smaller than it first appeared. When it contained all the infinite promise of our dreaming minds, it seemed immense. The child that we were escaped reality to invent a thousand worlds, a thousand possible futures, ceaselessly pushing the walls away from the edges of the cream-coloured carpet. The only thing that’s real is this little desk at which we’re sitting, with its worn bench and the graffiti carved into the wood. And the photograph immortalizing us in our younger years. The child sitting there is already different; he has left us, as he left the room, leaving only his image to occupy the premises. When we look at this portrait of the past, we think we remember …
What do we remember? We remember that everything started here. Since there is nothing more unreal than what will happen, we know that all dreams are possible. All limits to thought can be surpassed. The child’s imagination has no barriers, no prohibitions. It crosses worlds. It allows him to be several people at once. It is the infinite in a finite world.
He builds libraries for himself, at the whim of his encounters and experiences. And on the bookshelves, he knows that all the books are worlds to be explored and voyages to be undertaken.
Our memory is as prolix as the mind of a child. It dislocates, romanticizes, idealizes. Memory is intact there, but not real. The past belongs to the sentimental and emotional nebula. We do not damage the past, it is too fragile. We want to erase all obscure traces. We want to be able to turn around and use it for support, like an acroterion. We want it to be beautiful, this sarcophagus of lived instants that we are ready to adore with a tragic love.

We have just written a poem in a place where nothing grows. Even if the walls are thick; even if humidity causes damage; even if light does not penetrate, nothing can stop a man from dreaming …

When our memory vacillates and the prism of time distorts it before disappearing with us, then the object is archived. Solid. Genuine. Not deformable. Transmissible. Where else but in these photographs would we have discovered the juvenile faces of our parents and grandparents? In our reality they have the age of the present or of our most recent memories; we are already older than they were … Looking at a simple photo taken of them by the water’s edge, in the elegance of a spontaneous, day-to-day reality, we imagine what is outside the frame. We see their laughter and their first kisses. We hear their dreams and their discussions around a table laid for their friends. We imagine their energetic attitude to life. We sit with them around the table and we ourselves, understanding the story, take our places in the photo album, as we would take our places in a family novel.
Whether the moment is happy or tragic, it is part of us. Just like these indestructible concrete walls that sweat out a collective memory that cannot be erased. Knowing the history behind the walls means we are unable to ignore it. Architecture imposes its reality; it is enough to look at them to feel the walls vibrate, to hear the noises issuing from the past, the orders and the fears, to see the agitated water basins, the perspiration, the sweat, the breath, the smell of powder, of encroaching death …
The ruins are all we have left to conjure oblivion. They are the Pantheons of our history. We advance as in an open book. The world’s literature writes itself, chaotically. The ink is gradually fades, for memory cannot retain everything. We cannot entirely avoid History repeating itself. But so many blank pages remain …

I am an imaginary construction.

***

The inspiration wall

Reality is the wall against which we knock our heads. Only the present is real. Before and after is nothing more than a projection into an elsewhere of the imaginary. Thought grows like a weed, propagating all around, on the walls, around the leaves, in the air, hauntingly and inspiringly, fed by our multiple, accumulated lives, our conscious and unconscious influences, the distortions that we apply to lived realities. Our heads are a kind of reconstituted office, encumbered by a joyful, mixed up hodgepodge.
For officialdom, we are identity cards with a number and an expiry date; for our intimates, we are secrets; for our families, we are refuges; for our friends, we are « bon vivants » … At the same time, there are so many of us. And we are responsible for the final compromise.

***

From the past to the present

We never leave the past.
It recalls itself to us without being summoned.
Unconsciously, dissimulated in our memories,
It is there to tell us that history repeats itself.
History does not retain events,
it keeps no trace of the great, universal, timeless mythologies.
In entering the Present,
we participate in destiny,
which has always affected us and which partially escapes us.
How many wars? How many ideological struggles?
How many rafts have run aground in a quest for a Promised Land?
How many lifecycles illusorily reinvented?
How many icons to refer to?
Eras change and, with them, mentalities.
The days pass, conjuring the immutability of History.
One day, perhaps today,
the history of humanity will be called into question.
In the world’s abstraction, human reality will totter.
What is at play in the Present thus acquires all its meaning.
In this world of necessary illusions,
it is good not to be duped,
to ensure that the journey is worth the effort.
And here is where it begins …

***

The Present

To find the truth, we must renounce illusions.
The truth itself is but pure illusion,
yet we could not survive without it.

***

Wonderful World

I have news from the Sky … it’s not good.
What would a society with no memory look like? Like our great globalist abstraction park?
In the cupboard of the icons of the past, the heritage that gathers dust, the emblems of civilizations, overly intimate vernacular languages, the yardsticks of immemorial epochs … Long live Batman. Long live Mickey Mouse. Long live the contemporary icons of our infantile spectacle.

What a Wonderful World !

No to real stories! Too serious, too dramatic, too insoluble. If we witness something unsustainable on TV, all we need to do is reach out, turn it off and relax, trapping the world in a voiceless box. No risk of reality from the devilish smile of the atonal female presenter of the TV news. The sensationalist media chalks up a vision of life that matches our “available brain time”. It is a good thing that other people do our thinking for us. We almost had an opinion. Not really, consensus and the politically correct suit us so well. They suit the media too, a very supportive chorus, reframing History. Ratings are what matter, news is an archaic notion. They are thinking of our pleasure …

What a Wonderful World !

In the marvellous world of the Modern, we are given what we ask for. The main thing is that we are H-A-P-P-Y. And how could we not be? With our roller-skates, our riversides equipped with deckchairs and coconut palms, our entertainment festivals, our white nights, our Fêtes de la Musique, our museum-cities. What kind of happiness do you mean? One day we are reflecting on how to improve our cities ecologically, the next we gobble up low-cost airline tickets so that we can fly to the other side of the world. What cultural richness and openmindedness this globalized tourism is delivering to us! To survive reality, it is enough to invent a happy unreality.

What a Wonderful World !

When this world is not enough, we have to invent another one. Besides, “impossible” is not a concept that exists in this world. Today, there is no longer anything schizophrenic about wanting to be someone else. Being a star’s double; enjoying five minutes of glory thanks to lightening media coverage … But the greatest happiness is to be relieved of all responsibility. Hidden behind our screens, we have become virtual. There is no one to confront. We can satiate our desire for the ignoble at the click of a mouse. We stash ourselves away in the twenty-fifth hour of social networks.
We virtualize our relations, our businesses, our friends and our loves. In this new game in which we have entirely invaded the territory of the virtual, nothing engages us anymore.

It is hardly worth mentioning just how closely we are attached to this Wonderful World, which must be preserved. Consequently, we are, all of us, profoundly invested, all of us hearty “volunteers” in the task of saving the planet. With our Batman masks and our desire for compassion, we are well disposed to saving the world.
Perhaps we are seeking, above all, to save ourselves …

***

The Destiny of Men

Letter to the grandson

My dear grandson,

I wrote this letter I’m holding in my hand some time ago. I no longer know exactly when. Time has stretched and I’m unable to measure it well. It seems to me, at the dawn of my crossing of the shore, that I have always carried within myself what I have to say, but that I have not always wanted to confront it.
You are of an age for passionate pleasures. Passion is an ally. Your father, and I before him, have transmitted what we could. Today you are playing your role and you are frustrated by it, just as it frustrated me then. I still smile about it! I know, we learn from our experiences …
You see, Man demonstrates his genius, creates inventions, ceaselessly pushing back technical limits, continuously opening up new horizons. But the question of transmission persists, eternally.
Man is at ease with unreality, but reality often surpasses him. He invented mathematics. He has seen the Earth from afar. He sent the Rosetta space probe on a near 6 million kilometre journey to the heart of a comet. But he still has unanswered questions about how to raise his child. To raise a child is to raise a child to the heights …
So everything always begins anew. This is what forces us to stay humble.

Nothing is more unreal than the goal towards which we tend to. You will probably go astray. It’s good to get lost so that you can find out how to come back home. It’s good to dawdle along the road. I know that you’re in a hurry because you don’t believe in promises! Take your time but don’t lose your way. When you’re as old as I am, you will not be concerned with the quantity but, rather, with the quality of what you’ve managed to create.
The infinite gives us wings, and it’s because of the infinite that we dare to attempt the impossible and catch a glimpse of what’s happening on the other side of the horizon. If gravity forces us to circumscribe space, the lightness of thought carries us to distant, unknown, forbidden territories. Dare to visit them all. Your curiosity is insatiable. Feed it.
“Amor fati”: “Accomplish your destiny and love it”, the philosopher said. You see, we try as hard as we can. In other words, not hard enough. Awkwardly. The young adult that you are wants to outstrip all limits, even to the point of transcending your nature. And you’re absolutely right to! Even at the price of burning your wings, you should forget about the risk. Life isn’t about saving yourself or having a reductive vision of the world. You can’t please everyone and it would be vain and suicidal to wish to do so. My dear grandson, you will learn that it is better to have a bad reputation than a bad conscience.
The most profound thing that I can wish is for you is to win your freedom of mind. Your reality is what is most important. It isn’t the easiest project to complete. On the contrary, it will confront you with solitude, exigency and, in all probability, abnegation. Please don’t be an imitator. Fly with your own wings and you will achieve what counts in the The Destiny of Men.
In the chaos of our experiences and the arrogance of our craziest dreams, we transgress in order to drive ourselves forward and create the illusion that we are free. But what are we if not wild animals; self-destructive beasts with a penchant for creativity; perhaps the cruellest, the most barbaric of all … light and dark simultaneously. With age it would seem that wisdom comes to us without our bidding, as if to transmit with our last breath the hope of taming the barbarism. Before memory leaves me, “Don’t do anything that you might regret”. I understood too late that in the lightness of life and the illusory world the only reality is that of our acts. And this reality is irreversible …
Live as well and as nobly as you can. Raise yourself up.

Your grandfather.

***

The Artists

On seeing Giotto’s work, Dante examined the artist, perceiving his spirit, his trembling hand, his glory … Conception and realization are not sufficient without being remembered for posterity. An artist does not owe it to himself to be humble. Why would he be?
He is committed to the world, and merciless. His act implies an immense responsibility. Consciously, he seizes his tools as if they were weapons to become an alert witness of his times. Contrary to a too contemporary idea, not everything is art. But all art is political.
His role in History is preponderant.
The artist is an illusionist. All he has to do is name a thing for it to come to life, the word preceding the thing. All he has to do to make history is to transpose a his vision artistically. And freeze it. Thus, he stops time. His power surpasses him, as do his works, which no are no longer in his keeping. 
He is a player of the real. The actual blood of Franko B or the ketchup ersatz of McCarthy, the pictural realism of war in of Yan Pei Ming or the idea of a pictural scene made of ashes in Zhang Huan’s work. We witness an execution of truth. The veracity of the means applied is unimportant, as long as it justifies the artist’s visions and transpositions – fatal here – of the reality of society.
He is an illusionist who does not disappear behind his work. He is a fragment of that work, for he is its idea. His portrait becomes symbol. The man disappears behind the posture. Himself framed and displayed, like one of his works, he becomes a representation. In attaining an iconic status, he gives life to Dante’s words and enters History.

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A Small Man in a Big World

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History

Memory is the distortion between certainty and oblivion that creates a kind of vertigo.

The art movie

The cinematographic work:

The Scarcity of Miracle (2015), a 48-minutes film, is a political act, an essay of poetic resistance. It confronts Man to possible versions of reality and asks the fundamental question of what happens when one of those realities forces itself on the others.

Taken the thesis that every life is the probability of a miracle, man draws his vital strength from his relation to a cosmic reality. It is this creative strength, inventive and poetic, which involves him into an energy, and into an initiatory wandering through the world.

And yet, man is the prey of other humans, who are quick to reinvent such reality, which never seems to be enough. He must face technocratic deviances, moralizers who impose their diktats. Those ones who erase all trace of language, all form of imagination, all free will.

In this cultural shipwreck, these flatfooted men tend to make their point of view the only valid one.

> Bande Annonce :

The authors

Gérard Rancinan
GERARD RANCINAN

Frenchman Gérard Rancinan is an internationally recognized artist and photographer. His photographic works are included in great contemporary art collections and displayed in prestigious museums the world over. A wakeful witness of the metamorphoses undergone by humanity, Rancinan observes the world and delivers an uncompromising critique of the humours of the “Modern”.
Through his protean photography, in which form and content are always linked, Rancinan seeks to translate the questions attached to the deviances and contradictions of society. He never gives absolution, and, in spite of the occasional cruelty of his gaze, he never fails to show everything.
“Free thinker” is assuredly the only title to which he lays claim and to which he dedicates his life and work.
He is known not only for the relevance of his oeuvre, but also for the monumental size of his photographic works.
Rancinan is an Officier des Arts et Lettres and has won, among other things, six World Press awards.

His work has been featured in exhibitions at, among other places, the National Portrait Gallery in London; the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco; the Shanghai Himalayas Museum; the Louvre Lens, France; the Fondation Pinault de Dinard, France; the Oscar Niemayer Museum, Curitiba, Brazil; the Muséé des Arts et Métiers, Paris; the Danubiana Meulensteen Art Museum, Bratislava; and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris.
www.rancinan.com

***

Caroline Gaudriault
CAROLINE GAUDRIAULT

Author, designer of the calligraphic installation

Born in Paris, Caroline Gaudriault is the author of around a dozen books translated into English, and even Chinese. Long an independent journalist, she has worked with a series of international magazines. Her reportages have taken her around the world, where she has been able to observe human beings confronted by their modernity and to analyze its consequences.

She has conducted wide-ranging interviews with the leading thinkers of the day, interviews that have helped her develop her thought and which inform her detailed analyses of our humanity. Thus, the major figures of modern thought are happy to participate in her personal quest. The American political scientist and philosopher Francis Fukuyama was a major contributor to her most recent book.

She exhibits her texts in calligraphic installations, gradually adding the languages of the countries in which the host museums are located.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A Small Man in a Big World, Editions Paradox and Guangxi Normal University Press Group, 2014, with Francis Fukuyama

The Trilogy of the Moderns

Metamorphoses, Part 1, Editions Paradox, 2012
Hypotheses, Part 2, Editions Paradox, 2011
Wonderful World, Part 3, Editions Biro, 2009

The Photographer, Edition de la Martinière and Abrams, 2008, by Caroline Gaudriault and Gérard Rancinan

Urban Jungle, Edition de la Martinière, 2000, by Gérard Rancinan, with a preface by Caroline Gaudriault

www.zigzag-blog.com

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MUSEUM EXHIBITIONS
2000 to 2016

Base sous-marine, Bordeaux, France, 2016
Exhibition “ Scarcity of Miracle”

Urban Spree, Berlin, Germany, 2016
Exhibition “The Destiny of Men” Parts I & II

Montresso Art Foundation, Jardin Rouge, Marrakech, Morocco, 2016
Exhibition “Rancinan in Morocco” – inaugural exhibition for the museum of the Montresso Art Foundation

Kasteel van Gaasbeek, Brussels, Belgium, 2016
Collective Exhibition “Divine Decadence”, an exhibition in collaboration with Mechelen-based theatre group Abattoir Fermé, inspired by the book A Rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans

Accademia delle Arti del Disegno, Firenze, Italy, 2016
Exhibition “The Destiny of Men”, in collaboration with the author Caroline Gaudriault

Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille, Lille, France, from september 2015 to january 2016
Collective Exhibition - « Joie de Vivre »
Curator: Bruno Girveau

National Portrait Gallery, London, UK, 2015
Permanent Collection - « Barry McGuigan »
Curator : Paul Ardenne

Couvent des Cordeliers, Paris, France, happening from june 11 to june 14, 2015
Solo exhibition – « The Destiny of Men »
Curator : Paul Ardenne

Oceanographic Museum of Monaco, Monaco, april – june 2015-09-15
Solo exhibition – « Another Day on Earth »

Museum of Huelva, Spain, 2015
« The Trilogy of the Moderns »

Himalayas Art Contemporary Museum, Shanghai, China, sept-nov 2014
Solo exhibition - « The Trilogy of the Moderns »
50th anniversary for diplomatic relations betwwen France and China

Sinan Mansions, Shanghai, China, sept-nov 2014
Solo exhibition - « A Small Man in a Big World »

The Louvre Lens Museum, Lens, France, 2013 - 2018
« The liberty unveiled»

Quai d’Orsay, Ministery of Foreign affairs, Paris, France, 2013 - 2015
« Batman Family Boys»

Pinault Foundation and the city of Dinard, France, june - sept 2014
Collective exhibition with Jeff Koons, Andres Serrano, Subodh Gupta, Joel-Peter Witkin
Presentation of « the big supper »
Curator : Jean-Jacques Aillagon

Museo Oscar Niemeyer, Curitiba, Brazil, june 2014
Collective exhibition - « A Wonderful World ».

Art Contemporary Museum (MAC) of Lyon, France, feb-april 2014
Collective exhibition - « Moto Poétique ».
Curator : Paul Ardenne

Arts et Métiers Museum, Paris, France, oct - nov 2013
Solo exhibition - « The feast of Barbarians »

Danubiana Contemporary Art Museum of Bratislava, Slovakia, may– sept 2013
Solo exhibition - « The Trilogy of the Moderns »
Curator : Vincent Polakovic

Contemporary Art Museum Les Abattoirs of Toulouse, France, sept - oct 2012
Printemps de Septembre 2012 « L’Histoire est à moi ! »
Curator: Paul Ardenne
Collective exhibition with Anselm Kiefer, Pierre&Gilles, Mounir Fatmi

Londonewcastle Project Space, Shoreditch, London, Great Britain, june 2012
« Wonderful World »

Triennale di Milano, Milan, Italy, may 2012
Solo exhibition - « The Trilogy of the Moderns »
Curator : Claudio De Albertis

Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, La Haye, Holland, 2011
Reflex Miniature Museum – exposition collective avec Damien Hirst- George Baselitz – Yayoi Kusama- Roy Lichtenstein -

Chapelle Saint-Sauveur, Paris/Issy les Moulineaux, France, 2011
Solo exhibition - « Hypothèses »

The Louvre bookstore Paris, France, 2010
« Metamorphosis »

Galerie Rudolfinum, Musée des Arts Décoratifs of Praha, Czech Republic 2010
Exposition collective en compagnie de Damien Hirst, Andres Serrano, Cindy Sherman
« Decadence Now »

Barbizon, France, 2010
Collectiv exhibition with Combas, Erro, Klasen, Monory
« 150 artists for the 150 years of the Angelus of Millet»

Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France, nov-dec 2009
Solo exhibition - « Métamorphosis »
Curator : Marc-Olivier Wahler

Palazzio delle Esposizioni, Roma, Italy, may - july 2009
Exposition personnelle - « Le Photographe »

Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2008
Solo exhibition - « The Photographer »

Triennale Bovisa, Milano, Italy, july - sept 2008
Solo exhibition - « La Trilogie du Sacré Sauvage »

Barcelona Art Contemporary Museum (MACBA), Spain, 2007
Collectiv exhibition

Espace Pierre Cardin Paris, France, 2000
Solo exhibition - « Urban Jungle »

Press & Media

Le 20 heures du 9 décembre 2016 - TF1

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PNG - 23 kbParis Match
[Thursday, October 29th 2016]

Rancinan takes pictures of his reality - his way to best show the unreality of our world.
[…]A gigantic photograph, 8 meters high and 15 meters wide, welcomes the visitor at the end of the first pontoon. It shows two men, one wearing angel wings, visibly exhausted. Due to life, due to the tragic party that just ended.

Benjamin LOCOGE

JPEG - 829.2 kb

Rancinan floods Bordeaux - ParisMatch

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JPEG - 34.5 kbSUD OUEST
[Wednesday, October 12th 2016]

« Fragments of eternity »
«The Scarcity of Miracle» is not a retrospective, but an initiatory journey, diving into a protean universe, where anyone can develop his own writting, as an answer to the other. Even though they always keep a foot in the present time, Gérard Rancinan and Caroline Gaudriault both have a tremendous hold on the notion of time ticking by.

Céline MUSSEAU

Augmented reality : Article 12-10-2016
An angel and two pursuers in the streets of Bordeaux : Article 03-11-2016
Gerard Rancinan an eye on the volts of humanité : Article 08-11-2016

JPEG - 1.6 Mb
"La certitude d’un succès" Céline Musseau
Sud Ouest du 14 Dec 2016

JPEG - 613.6 kb
"55 000 visiteurs du Miracle" Yannick Delneste
Sud Ouest du 29 Nov 2016

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PNG - 26.6 kbFrance 3 Aquitaine
[Thursday, October 13th and Thursday, November 4th 2016]

Imagination, but also a lot of humor. If this exhibition is not a retrospective, we still find several monumental prints that were already shown around the world, such as « The Raft of Illusions » inspired by Gericault, which evokes the illusory dream of the search for an El Dorado, the western world.
Marion Gadea

It had to be Gérard Rancinan and his exuberance to imagine the wander of his characters throughout the streets of Bordeaux.
Marie Pujolas

Gérard Rancinan and his « Scarcity of Miracle » at the Submarine Base of Bordeaux

An angel escapes from Gerard Rancinan’s exhibition in Bordeaux

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PNG - 41.5 kbDirectMatin
[Thursday, October 13th 2016]

His famous picture « the Party is over » and his cursed angels from the series « the Destiny of Men » as a monumental and striking welcome, his « Raft of Illusions » or Géricault in the land of migrants… but also some more joyous pictures, almost burlesque - his Mickey Mouse’s head on a silver platter or a junk food version of the Last Supper. Over-polished baroque style to draw metaphors of our modern lives. And as a bonus, photographs from his early career, and other from his highest time as a photojournalist.
Laurent Theillet

Exhibition RANCINAN - GAUDRIAULT in Bordeaux !!!

Contact & Partners

Gérard Rancinan and Caroline Gaudriault
are represented worldwide by :

Fine Art Cube

contact@fineartcube.com
+33 (0) 1 56 20 15 40

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Our Partners :

PNG - 25.3 kb Ville de BORDEAUX et BORDEAUX CULTURE
PNG - 27.5 kb LAND ROVER
PNG - 19.1 kb JAGUAR