INTERVIEW. The Norman painter Christophe Ronel exhibits in Rouen, “an invitation to travel”

The painter Christophe Ronel has been exhibiting extensively across the country for forty years. This month, two exhibitions are planned in the Rouen metropolitan area. The opportunity for the public to discover his works, where imagination and reality intersect.

His works are an invitation to travel. The Rouen painter Christophe Ronel has the soul of an explorer. For more than 40 years, he has held numerous exhibitions throughout France, but also extensively in Asia.

• It is abroad that you find inspiration for your paintings, why this need elsewhere?

It’s a very traveling inspiration that has pursued me for a long time. I think that there is no real life or art possible without mixing. For my part, I operate with this curiosity for movement, for elsewhere, for the strange and also the foreign. I have a strong taste for differences.

• Which trips have inspired you the most?

I often mention India, a destination I have visited several times. I also really like Africa and Mexico. “I have a house in every country, but I don’t know where it is.”this sentence taken from an Indian poem written by Rabindranath Tagore, inspires me a lot. This very much evokes the gift of ubiquity (being in several places at the same time, editor’s note), the fact of being able to live elsewhere and of having this illusion of being “citizen of the world”. It’s a form of nomadism that suits me well.

• This nomadism is found in your very colorful paintings. You also paint animals a lot: what is it about them that fascinates you so much?

The animal is indeed very present. The elephant, the rhino: these animals carry the world. Its skin finds itself encrusted with a thousand things, on the back there can be superpositions and stacks of elements. Furthermore, the dimension of the fable, the story, the tale and the imagination, which the animal allows, pleases me. Suddenly, there is a shift: what is reality and what becomes fiction.

• You have been immersed in painting since you were very young, because your father was a painter. How has this influenced you from a young age?

It’s true that I was immersed in the atmosphere, I was immersed in painting very early on. My father, Marcel Laquay, was a painter of the Norman school. I started in the field, with oil painting, sketching and painting from nature.

• This fall, you are exhibiting on two sites in the Rouen metropolitan area, what awaits visitors?

It is at the cultural center at the Bonsecours casino that I am exhibiting until October 13, it is open every day. It is a retrospective journey from 1994 to 2015, with large format paintings and showcases of sketches. I also organize guided tours on Sunday afternoons.

The other exhibition will take place at the Rollin gallery in Rouen, the exhibition begins on October 11 and lasts one month. Moreover, at that time, a book will be released by Area Editions in Paris, with 230 pages of paintings, memories, archives, drawings with lots of texts. A big job, because we’ve been working on it for a year now.