Started in Paris, the series Voyages sur le motif is above all the result of several stays in Brittany. Each canvas was created facing nature, facing the sky, and bears the name of the place where it was created: Champ de Mars, Dinard, Baie du Mont-Saint-Michel, Île-de-Bréhat, Crozon, Île Bruc, Belle-Île… Renk follows the path of the Impressionists and, like them, carries his materials for painting outdoors without any preliminary sketch. He paints «on the motif».

An autodidact artist, he uses the aerosol spray to represent skies where colors fade to reveal harmony. The sky is at the center of his research, not for its picturesque effect but to illustrate, spontaneously, the variations of colors, shadows, and lights. These works are an accumulation of his «Renk» tag, with different sizes and colors, repeated infinitely until they disappear.

While graffiti is a medium of expression often associated with notions of protest, appropriation, and territory, Renk, by contrast, seems determined to make his tag disappear by repeating it endlessly, while retaining the creative gesture and the aerosol technique. The tireless repetition of his tag has always been the foundation of his works, but his method evolves with each series. Until now, all his paintings were created from his imagination and produced indoors. Renk begins to paint in the daylight, face to face with nature, after setting up a stretcher in the vineyards during a stay in the South of France. And soon his first canvases painted while contemplating the sky are born.

«I come from graffiti. My intention was to go into the studio to make my painting, and after a few years it was the opposite. It became ‘I want to get out of the studio’.» (Renk, 2022)

An artist full of contrasts, between abundance and order, maturity and childhood obsessions, the serenity of his paintings and the energy of his creative act, Renk brilliantly blends his influences from street art and impressionism to create Voyages sur le motif.