Renaud Allirand -prints and biography

Renaud Allirand: Between Gesture and Geometry

Renaud Allirand (b. 1970) is a French painter, printmaker, and draftsman whose work bridges the disciplines of painting, drawing, and engraving. He lives and works between Paris and a former abbey near Fontainebleau, where the rhythms of the surrounding landscape quietly shape the meditative qualities of his art. A prolific and versatile creator, Allirand has also collaborated on numerous illustrated artist books, expanding his practice into dialogue with writers and poets. His work has been widely exhibited, honored with international awards, and collected by public institutions and private collectors across Europe and the United States.

Though Allirand began as a painter, it is through printmaking that his artistic language has found its deepest voice. Since 2002, under the encouragement of master engraver René Tazé, he has devoted himself to the demanding techniques of drypoint and etching. Through these processes, he has forged a distinctive visual vocabulary—one that exists in the space between geometry and gesture, structure and spontaneity.

His imagery often unfolds along two parallel paths. On one side, his compositions draw on architectural order, suggesting interiors, façades, landscapes, or constructed spaces through subtly rendered geometrical forms. On the other, he pursues a more gestural approach, where calligraphic marks evoke handwriting, fleeting notations, or primal signs. These two modes interact across his body of work, creating a dialogue between rational design and expressive freedom.

Allirand’s etching process is uniquely experimental. Using a brush dipped in hydrochloric acid, he paints directly onto zinc plates in a method akin to working with Chinese ink. Once printed, these marks appear as irregular, evanescent lines, balancing between presence and disappearance. Rendered in delicate greys and transparent tonalities, his prints resonate with a quiet luminosity, inviting contemplation and evoking a sense of passage or transition.

His own reflections reveal how engraving became a turning point in his creative life. After a decade dedicated to painting in ink, he sought a way to “write without words,” to give form to an interior language. Printmaking offered that possibility, allowing him to “engrave” lines as though they were intimate words. This transformation led his painting toward a new architecture of light, horizontals and verticals, windows and thresholds, always suggesting imaginary landscapes infused with northern light.

Over the years, Allirand has been recognized with numerous international distinctions and has exhibited widely in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. His works belong to museum and library collections in France, Germany, Spain, the United States, and beyond. Whether on canvas, paper, or copper plate, Allirand’s art is unified by a search for balance between clarity and ambiguity, construction and dissolution. His prints, drawings, and paintings remain records of a personal language—part architecture, part script, part silence—through which he continues to explore the intersections of memory, landscape, and light.