07.22.—08.27.2022
The Lover’s Reverie
JD Raenbeau
The Lover Longing, 2022, 24 x 18 inches, oil on panel
Lauren Powell Projects is thrilled to present The Lover’s Reverie the first Los Angeles solo show from New York based painter JD Raenbeau, on view from July 22 - August 27, including lush oil paintings, watercolors, drawings, and a site-specific mural. Working from life and fantasy in his North Fork Long Island garden, Raenbeau brings viewers into an ecstatic world where pleasures of the flesh open our senses to a web of interbeing that includes human lovers, their garden surroundings, and the enveloping earth. In spite of his belief in the liberatory power of love, Raenbeau works under a pseudonym, protecting his identity as an artist from the public school district where he teaches. In so doing, he joins a lineage of queer artists who have engaged in camaflauge and compartmentalization as means of survival.
Raenbeau draws inspiration from the work of Rococo master Jean Honoré Fragonard, an artist who is often sidelined as “frivolous” or kitsch in the art historical canon. Raenbeau invites us into a queer reading of
Frangonard’s work, highlighting its use of landscape and non-human actors as participants in unfolding dramas of love, desire, courtship and fantasy.
Raenbeau crops his references to Fragonard to highlight the role of non-human actors in cascading passions. The taut edge of a shiny gourd becomes the continuation of a muscular thigh, while leaves and flowers overlay the head of a lady who fingers the voluptuous folds of her pink taffeta skirt. The soft green mural inspired by Fragonard’s expressive trees is a bed for the buzzing action of Reanbeau’s most elaborate pieces.
In some works, human figures merge with bursting peonies or the hairy, purple velvet of an iris. A luciously-painted Black Eyed Susan may stare at us like an open orifice in this garden of delights, while a Sensitive Fern, painted plein aire, exhibits the pulsation of form releasing into formlessness with deft economy. Dappled light plays like a benevolent voyeur in Reanbeau’s watercolors. Colored-pencil bouquets sparkle in the softening lens of a daydream.
Raenbeau’s oil paintings layer sex and plants in a masterly continuum that flows from tight realism to loose, wet strokes of bold color. In The Lover Consumed, images of Raenbeau and his partner layer on top of one another, framed by a copy of The Happy Lovers, by Fragonard. Raenbeau’s cropping and layering of images expresses the synesthetic blurring of boundaries between human lovers during an erotic exchange. It also takes us further by awakening the possibility of experiencing our interbeing with a more-than-human world of the garden and the living earth.
Raenbeau’s work joyfully upends multiple patriarchal metanarratives -- from the antifeminist myth of the garden of Eden; to the accepted hierarchy of “history painting” above romance, relationship and decoration; to the very idea of that there is separation between humans and the living earth that evolved us. Raenbeau tends and is attended to by his lover and his garden. Plants and humans flower and go to seed before our eyes against the cooling green backdrop of a summer afternoon.
Raenbeau holds an MFA from the School of Visual Arts and a BFA from Alfred University.
