May 9 – July 3, 2025
Opening Reception:
Friday, May 9, 2025
6 – 8 PM
CLAMP is pleased to present “At Home with You,” an exhibition of recent paintings and drawings by JD Raenbeau. This is the artist’s first solo show with the gallery.
The artist writes: “I paint in a way that evokes the experience of entering a wild garden. I use large marks or thick impasto strokes to convey the overwhelming blur of sensory input. My paintings capture that feeling of being surrounded by nature’s abundance, where details emerge gradually.”
Drawing inspiration from the lush gardens surrounding his home on the North Fork of Long Island, Raenbeau creates a euphoric fantasm of human lovers, verdant vegetation, and often a mysterious sense of intrigue. Taking en plein air painting to queer new realms, Raenbeau joyfully explores analogies between the tending of human relationships to a care of the land.
Light and its play across the surface of plants and human flesh have always been a fascination for the artist, but in the new exhibition, he broadens his focus from long and warm summer afternoon sunlight to artificial color lights illuminating figures in the garden deep into the night. And the formal boundaries are further pushed by a tight realism in some works to wild and wet abstract passages of pure paint in others. Raenbeau leads the eye from background to foreground and from the center of the works to the outer edges with radical shifts in the depth of field, luscious and sometimes psychedelic color harmonies, and expert variations in the handling of paint.
As a public school teacher in a conservative district, JD Raenbeau is a pseudonym created to protect the artist’s identity. Joining legions of other queer and avant garde painters and writers, Raenbeau employs camouflage as a means of survival.
JD Raenbeau (b. 1985) currently lives and works on Long Island, New York. He earned his MFA from the School of Visual Arts where he received the Paula Rhodes Memorial Award for Exceptional Achievement in Art Practice, and holds a BFA from Alfred University. Raenbeau has exhibited his work in New York City, Brooklyn, Los Angeles, New Mexico, and the United Kingdom, with his most recent solo exhibition at Lauren Powell Projects in Los Angeles. His work has been featured in New American Paintings, Artsin Square Magazine, and Sensitive Content Magazine. He was recently an Artist in Residence at the Vermont Studio Center, and most recently attended residency at The Golden Foundation for The Arts in July 2024. He will be an Artist in Residence at the Hafnarborg Museum in Hafnarfjordur, Iceland in July 2025.