Renaud Allirand

Renaud Allirand: Between Gesture and Geometry

Born in 1970, French artist Renaud Allirand lives and works between Paris and a former abbey near Fontainebleau, where the surrounding landscape plays a quiet role in shaping his creative world. A multidisciplinary artist, Allirand works in painting, printmaking, and drawing, and has collaborated extensively on illustrated artist books. His works have garnered numerous international awards and are held in both public and private collections throughout Europe and the United States.

Although Allirand began his career as a painter, it is in intaglio printmaking—particularly drypoint and etching—that his artistic language has found its deepest expression. Since 2002, under the encouragement of the esteemed copper-plate engraver René Tazé, Allirand has honed his skills as an engraver, developing a distinctive visual vocabulary that bridges abstraction and architecture.

His prints tend to explore two core themes. One is geometrical, evoking constructed spaces—interiors, townscapes, and landscapes—through subtly defined forms. The other is gestural, comprising expressive, calligraphic lines reminiscent of handwriting or elemental mark-making. These contrasting modes form a dynamic dialogue across his body of work.

Allirand’s etching process is both technically innovative and visually delicate. Using a fine brush dipped in hydrochloric acid, he paints directly onto zinc plates—a technique akin to working with Indian ink. After inking and printing, the resulting image reveals irregular, almost ephemeral lines that hover between visibility and disappearance, often rendered in soft, transparent greys that lend a meditative quiet to the finished work.

Artist's Statement:
"Engraving has always fascinated me, but I waited a long time to buy a copper plate, 10 years exactly. 10 years of painting, with inks from China, 10 years of work without a word, and one day, I wanted, urgently needed to express differently, did I want to write, but how? 

I wanted words intimate but transitory. Engraving then seemed the single means, to write with the precision of the truest words of the dry point. Thanks to these "writings" , the method of engraving was opened, and my painting moved into printmaking, with horizontal lines and verticals, not of colors, an architecture with the research of light. Always imaginary landscapes, the light of north, a window, a passage, lines which cross such engravings, seeks tensions which maintain upright, constructions and rebuildings. To write a word or to trace a line, the idea remains the same one: to release itself. Downstroke and upstroke or straightnesses, part of oneself is engraved."