Jean Pierre Raynaud remains faithful to his studies at the Horticulture School of Versailles and his first compositions in 1959 refer to "an urban nature" made of road signs on wooden panels. After 1963 he created what he called Psycho-Objects: flowerpots, butcher's hooks, gauges, fire extinguishers, road signs... suggesting an unlikely combination of utensils picked from his daily environment to compose the raw material of his artwork. These objects always carry symbols, reminders of conduct, and reveal a true poetry of the emergency.
In this scope, Raynaud focuses on two contrasting colors with very strong emotional connotations. Thus white, with its suggestion of clinical purity, sterility and emptiness, is opposed to red, which symbolizes the alarm, danger and violence. Both depict these kinds of modern emblems of society. This choice of duality brings a terrifying presence to his pieces as it could be felt in his stunning installation presented at Laurent Strouk Gallery in 2020 in the midst of the pandemic. There were huge "no traffic" signs with holes from rifle bullets.
The artist expresses himself with the same efficiency as traffic regulations, in ways which keep emotions from being revealed and which coldly expose a situation, even if it is a drastic one. He gives the viewers all freedom to choose but influences their reactions without invoking their feelings.
The mental intrusion that he delivers, bringing together Duchamp’s readymades and Mondrian’s primary colors, gives the object a new artistic purpose without distorting it but by over-saturating its aggressiveness. Through this contrast of red and white, of which the goal is to "intensify the red", the artist summarizes all the constraints raised in front of the human being and presents a fertile dialogue between hygiene and cruelty, between life and death.
As the critic François Pluchart points out: "Raynaud has uncovered a visual system through which he brought to New Realism the constructivist rigor it lacked and to Pop Art an aggressiveness that it would never have known otherwise" Through his work, the artist efficiently raises questions about society, often combined with a feeling of vertigo, sometimes even existential nausea. The violence of the artwork touches the soul, shocks the reason, bruises the mind and even scratches the emotions.
Raynaud is one of the artists that the poet and art critic Alain Jouffroy likes to call "The Objectivists" and he specifies: "When facing Jean Pierre Raynaud's objects, silent as tombstones, you feel like you are witnessing a prisoner's dream...
His object-paintings are all like walls: clean, tiled, smooth, sterile. An unbreakable order reigns, and the peace that one finds in this work reflects an unidentifiable absence. His "Objects" carry evidence that rivals our daily environment but confuse the viewer as the signs they express are mainly there to disturb. Without being able to grasp the purpose of such an operation, one senses the artist's desire to measure, to calibrate, to categorize, to criticize the society in its most coercive aspect.