Vivien Racault is a French visual artist who uses photography and digital post production, as well as music, writing, multimedia and scenography. He expands a global artwork, deeply rooted in the great tradition of cosmogonies, from the original myths that have built our human civilizations to the personal myths of poets like Charles Baudelaire or H.P. Lovecraft, from the representation of the divine in religious art to the tracks of that lost homeland evoked by painter Caspar David Friedrich.
His work is often refered to as "Mystery Art".
Metaphysical research, lyricism of the Fantastic, but also technological and social satire, indicment of collective cruelty expressions : Racault’s artwork is both. Its aim is to restore original connexions to invisibility and sacred in the images, being resolutely universal with a non human-centered approach and a spontaneous expression of dreams, fighting against the cult of the consumer objects in the art world.
In chiaroscuro lightings favorable to distorsion, the artist summons dark forces and climaxes that remind of Gregory Crewdson and Cindy Sherman’s works.
But while Racault's visual fascination with organic and non-orgnanic complex textures evokes a baroque tendency in occidental art, from Bernini to H.R. Giger, passing by way of Gustave Moreau and the Surrealists, his visual fascination with the basic properties of water (reflective and translucent, clear and opaque) meets Bill Viola's video art, and his obsession for patterns, luminous spots and reflections finds an echo in Yayoi Kusama's as well as in some indigenous artwork.
Racault thus builds vertiginous bridges between the transcendent sublime and the immanent grotesque, between tradition and contemporary art, between a very accessible form and a much more challenging reflexion ... in the end, he reconciles the cultural antipodes in a supernatural place inspired by animism, as well as classical art or pop culture.
In our time of exhaustion of ecosystems and societies, in the obscene violence of omnipotent media flows becoming mass chemical signals, and in the urgency of a revolution of a humanity at last liberated from the tyranny of numbers, this artwork confesses a disturbing topicality and paradoxically leads the public to question reality through critical imagination.
Vivien Racault was born in Reunion Island, a French territory close from Madagascar and Southern Africa. He has completed a Master’s Degree in Multimedia Direction in Paris 8 University and a Bachelor’s Degree in French and English Literatures in Paris 4 – Sorbonne University. He has works in private collections in Europe, in Australia and in the Reunion Island Department Artotheque’s permanent collection.
