13 MAR until 18 APR 2026

In his current exhibition at Klemm’s, “The Weird and the Eerie,” Renaud Regnery deepens his exploration of the emotional and social conditions of modern and contemporary image production. Immediate painterly gestures — charcoal pencil and pure pigment in an interplay of emotion and control — meet the psycho-logical charge of photo-realistic wallpapers and made-on-demand wall coverings.

At the heart of Regnery’s painting is his ongoing interest in the uncanny, in traditional social conventions, their aesthetic manifestations, and the associated questions of taste, zeitgeist, and standardization. Over the years, Regnery has built his compositions on similar elements: his source material, which is used equally as a background, projection surface, and reaction surface, ranges from handmade wall coverings from the early 1920s to mass-produced wallpapers from recent decades to the photorealistic, AI-supported print-on-demand products of recent years.

Regnery’s paintings are immediate and at the same time filtered reactions to first impressions: specific patterns, aesthetics, and materialities. He destroys, washes out, layers, alters, and paints over. In each case, he does so with a precise painterly approach, sometimes as gestural abstraction, sometimes as finely crafted, quasi-figurative oil painting.

The exhibition title—The Weird and the Eerie—is borrowed from Mark Fisher’s book of the same name and is based on processes of deconstruction; how are symbolic elements of the visual language of late capitalism intertwined with human psychology, subjectivity, and sensitivity?

With the recently begun cycle of works entitled “Echo Paintings,” which is on view for the first time in The Weird and the Eerie, Regnery opens up an indeterminate space that breaks down physicality, gestures, and facial expressions down to essential signs and gives expression to the undefined yet increasingly concrete feeling of pressure and anxiety and the hyper-alertness that seems to permeate our societies more and more.

Some paintings oscillate between figuration and abstraction, worked over several layers of wash and overpainting. Others are reduced to muted, shimmering, almost metallic-looking surfaces interspersed with minimalist forms. What is striking is the deliberately maintained ambivalence of the entire pictorial vocabulary, which Regnery intersects with the underlying layers of wallpaper and paper: fragments of fresh or barely healed wounds, pustules, knuckles and marks, frown lines, frozen laughter, grimness, fear?

These are existential images—lurking, concentrated, and at the same time overly present, as self-evident as they are enigmatic. They could be images, afterimages of a consciousness in upheaval.

The Weird and the Eerie opens on March 13 and runs until April 24, 2026.