Cécile Raynal: Travers|ées

From the 13th of September to the 18th of October 2014, the French city of Rouen is host to a retrospective of artist Cécile Raynal.

Entitled Travers|ées (Crossings), the event will display the artist’s most recent “immersions” in places on the outskirts of society that she explores through the local population: prisons, container ships, hospitals, retirement homes, convents… The works created from these residences (more than 80 sculptures and installations) are on show in seven different places throughout the town, from the interior courtyard of the Courthouse to the Fine Arts Museum, through the Opera house and the Port.

Cécile Raynal’s sculpture is testimony to the meetings as much as to the places where the sculpted one to ones take place. She is a spokesperson of the anonymous singularities and questions at the same time the identity and the description, the interdependence and the solitude.

Portraits of objects and animals occasionally slip in amongst the host of human portraits. The former evolve in a conversation with mythology, tales, psyche and memories. From portraits and stories of each and every person, emerge groups of sculptures that develop as a witness to the paradox of human condition.

The projects of Cécile Raynal are promoted by the association “Regards Croisés” which has brought together several partners for this exhibition: The Région Haute-Normandie, the Ville de Rouen, the Théâtre des Arts, the Port de Rouen HAROPA, the CHU-Hôpitaux de Rouen, the Ministère de la Justice and the Matmut.

Born in 1966, graduate from the School of Beaux Arts in Toulouse, Cécile Raynal now lives and works in Normandy, France. Artist and dancer, concentrating on sculpture since 2008, she focuses her art on portraits of people, animals and objects, treating faces as veritable landscapes and homes of memories. To her, sculpture is a tool for exploring the world, somewhere between fiction and documentary. And so she often sets up her workshop in these closed off, forgotten and marginal places which she frequents and reconstitutes in her installations.