He had the deep voice of a Jean-Pierre Marielle and the pointillist brush of a Seurat. Without having, of course, the notoriety of one and the other. But his peers extolled his drawings, his paintings, their palette of incomparable delicacy, and the disarming simplicity of their subject matter. Loïc Raguénès died Friday in Douarnenez (Finistère), of a heart attack. He was 54 years old.
It was at the Beaux-Arts de Besançon that he finished his studies, after a stint in Nîmes, and it was in Dijon, until 2011, that Loïc Raguénès developed a method and a style of monochrome drawings, in colored pencil, which occupy him for years. Patiently, the artist copies by hand, in large dotted lines and, in short, by imitating the printing screen, images taken from magazines or art books. Jean-Paul Belmondo in the Mississippi Mermaid, Chapi Chapo, wild geese flying towards the horizon, François Hollande with folded hands and dreamy eyes in front of the emblem of the Socialist Party, the wave of Hokusai, a few female nudes with blue flower eroticism, synchronized swimming ballets… All this constitutes the corpus of Raguénès, imbued with a nostalgia not exempt from derision for the France of the 70s, and not devoid of a certain sentimentality, attenuated however by these dotted lines which blur the image, make it tremble in the eye and the heart of the viewer. There is in this way of remaking by hand the model of a mechanically reproduced image something deliberately vain which is all the more affirmed when Raguénès passes to the scale of the mural painting.
For ten years, however, he had changed work and life (moving to Douarnenez, and working with the Clearing gallery, located in New York and Brussels). Abandoning small dots and images, he painted equally dreamy and a priori regressive canvases, where very schematic ripples crossed the picture with their lazy undulations and where planets, round like balloons, of all colors, shone weakly on a midnight blue background, figuring as much infinite space as a simple playground, and maintaining the confusion between near and far.