Peggy Renaud – Peggy la féticheuse
CE QUE NOUS FERONS DU TEMPS
Meeting Peggy Renaud is a bit like a walk. We have plenty of time, we walk and we talk about what makes life. The path sinks into the woods, without the shadow taking precedence over the light. Out of discretion, we will say that his house is there, the same color as what surrounds him, made of wood and earth. A composite house, in the image of our lives. In one corner, rusty tools, metal plates, gears; more, far from wood, planks and branches, rolled by the river or the ocean. And in the middle of all that a little music that comes back. Peggy Renaud is a country woman, as we used to say. His hands love this rough contact, so to speak from the beginning. “I have always had an attraction for the earth. That I make ceramics is no coincidence, it fascinates me, the earth and what goes with it, wood, fire, water… But I also think that earth is time.” She just said the word. Because it is at the heart of its creation, this wonderful mechanism, which carries the value of things, their happiness, their memory, and the rest too, since we have to deal with it.

What if everything was there, around us, like a synthesis of feeling? “I spent part of my childhood in Africa. My father worked on the construction of a dam in Nigeria. I think I brought back images of clarity, light and scents that stick together.” Collage therefore, the assembly that she repeats in her work, through her sculptures, masks and totems, painted with plant pigments and solar rusts. Time always, even in the first object, in the manner of African creators, recovered, unearthed and unearthed, returned to another life. "I'm not trying to find out what he was used for, and where he comes from, I just feel that he lived, that hands held him... and I offer him something else." The object in a dialogue that invents itself.


There is necessarily a spirituality in this research, but she does not talk about it. From his travels in Africa either. Yet they are frequent, essential to her imagination and no doubt, they bring her back to the essentials. Ceramic is one of them and Kossi Homawoo intends to associate it with its lights. Light and earth, two alchemical principles in creation.


In a very beautiful series, which is called “Terres-ponges”, Peggy precisely questions this original pulsation. A billion years ago, among the first living forms, appeared these mysterious creatures, at the intersection of genres. It's quite magical a sponge, which would have been born in the fire and the sea, and which would take from a flower and an animal. It's life and it's time, in the most mysterious of associations. Peggy Renaud smiles. Time is immense, and it is like a garden, in the middle of itself.

Roger Calmé (ZO mag’)