The French Pictures

The mystic visions of Hildegard von Bingen were long understood as moments of divine intervention — or, later, as the physiological afterimage of persistent migraines. What she described was not revelation received through the body, but pictures appearing beyond it: images seen while fully awake, her outward eyes open, yet perceived only in the soul. Writing at the age of seventy-seven to the monk Guibert of Gembloux, Hildegard explained how her inner sight rose into the vault of heaven and dispersed itself among distant peoples and places. These were not sounds heard, nor thoughts formed, nor sensations gathered through the five senses, but visions unfolding internally — luminous, unstable, hovering like flame or cloud. She saw them day and night, often while sick, exhausted, and in pain so severe it threatened to undo her. Still, the pictures persisted: a light “far brighter than a cloud carrying the sun,” images demanding to be recorded. Centuries later, the historian of science Charles Singer would look again at these visions and recognize something else within them. Reading Hildegard’s descriptions, he identified forms familiar to modern neurology: the scintillating scotoma of migraine, the fractured geometry of nervous disturbance. What had once been understood as revelation became, in his account, a different kind of image — not sent from above, but generated within. Between divine vision and medical diagnosis, the picture remains unresolved. What persists is the image itself: unstable, radiant, difficult to locate. In French Pictures, Renaud Jerez inhabits this uncertainty — where images are neither fully symbolic nor purely clinical, neither hallucination nor representation. Pictures emerge as visions without origin, surfaces charged with belief, distortion, and desire — fragments that hover between seeing and knowing, faith and interference. Here, the picture is not what explains the world, but what interrupts it. - Working across styles and mediums, but with a concentration on sculpture, Renaud Jerez (b. 1982, Narbonne, France) uses craft and industrial materials to create haunting, humorous, and abject sculptures that imagine the future through monsters and ruins. Intricate and violent, these forms frequently present a human form consumed with architecture and technology. Renaud Jerez’s recent solo exhibitions include : Crèvecoeur, Paris (FR), Musée des Abattoirs, Toulouse (FR), ICA, Miami (US), Jenny’s, Los Angeles (US), National Gallery, Prague (CZ). He has also participated in numerous group exhibitions at Palais de Tokyo, Paris (FR), Consortium, Dijon (FR), New Museum, New York (USA), Centre Pompidou, Metz (FR), MO.CO, Montpellier (FR), macLYON, Lyon (FR), Tri Postal/Lille 3000 (FR), Dortmunder Kunstverein (DE), Kunsthalle KAI10, Arthena Foundation, Düsseldorf (DE), Mainz (DE), MAAT, Lisbon (PT)... His work is held in institutional collections such as Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (FR), Les Abattoirs - FRAC Occitanie Toulouse (FR), David Roberts Art Foundation, London (UK), GAMeC, Bergamo (IT), FRAC des Pays de la Loire (FR), Centre National des Arts Plastiques (CNAP) (FR), MAC VAL (FR). Renaud Jerez is represented by Crèvecoeur gallery in Paris.