Cécile Raynal: women of earth and fire

This collection features twenty portraits of women, sculpted by Cécile Raynal over the last ten years during residencies in uncommon places or on the fringes of society. In these face-to-face encounters around a block of clay, and through the exchanges they provoke, the artist gives us a glimpse into the life stories of these anonymous, tenacious women, fighting destinies controlled by sexism.

These portraits of women dialogue with that of a historical figure, rare in the artist’s work: Olympe de Gouges, a figure of the French Revolution and a pioneer of feminism in France, who was guillotined at the age of 45. Cécile Raynal said of her: “If Olympe de Gouges has become a symbol, (…) it’s because she was one of those people who said no and proposed alternatives to the inevitabilities and norms of the day. She is one of those insubordinate women who place themselves on an equal footing with men in thought, spirit and expression, and who defy history when it seeks to silence them”.

The other portraits in this collection are of anonymous women whose paths the artist crossed during residencies in places outside the art world. For the past fifteen years, Cécile Raynal has been moving her studio into enclosed spaces that are forbidden or avoided: prisons, nursing homes, hospitals, maternity wards, cargo ships, etc. She invites the men and women who live there to take time out to pose for her work. During these encounters outside of everyday life, she models portraits of people we don’t normally meet.

Her sculptures are nourished by the stories told to her during these encounters. The artist seeks to see – or to see better – in order to show us what we have not seen. She explores the individual beyond their social position, their function or the space they inhabit, in search of depth.

These twenty portraits of women illustrate this approach. There are teenage girls she met in the child psychiatric ward of a hospital, women she met in the corridors of a maternity ward, female seafarers on a cargo ship… During a residency in a social centre in Normandy (France) in 2018, Cécile Raynal wrote: “I admired the women I met there. The women and the girls. Just as I often admire them for their tenacity, their ways of taking on reality and twisting the neck of sexist inevitabilities.” An echo is created between these anonymous figures and the celebrated figure of Olympe de Gouges.

Each of these portraits combines strength and vulnerability, a presence that is both fierce and tender. The artist rejects unambiguous representations, hymns that ring false because they fail to acknowledge the complexity of human nature. Rather than a black-and-white vision, she prefers the grey spectrum of her smoky sandstone figures, modelled in the clay and hardened in the flames. To approach Cécile Raynal’s sculpture is to penetrate the meaning of an artistic approach in which art and life are difficult to separate.

Over the years, all kinds of archetypal figures, handed down from myths, tales and seminal works, have appeared in her sculptures: birds, wolves, donkeys, foxes, goats, hares, monsters and chimeras. For the artist: “The animal figures that often populate my installations have come about as a direct echo and reflection of encounters and places. There are common languages, secrets and connections between us and the animals”.