Hors Cadre

Maurice Renoma is an unclassifiable visionary. Through an “impulsive” aesthetic, he was able to create, from fashion to image, a transgressive and abundant universe. Retracing both its 60 years of creation and its high personality color, such are the ambitions of this beautiful book, the first to highlight the entirety of his artistic career.

Like his transgressive approach, his photo-graphic series are mixed there to be recomposed and sewn together in the form of a patchwork of different experiences, but very coherent in their semantics search.

To punctuate this abundant iconography, 20 text-concepts, voluntary digressions that can recall a Prévertstyle inventory, (de)construct linearity of the life of this creator who rebels against norms.

Finally, the six testimonies of well-known personalities, but nevertheless intimate with the artist, provide a counterpoint sensitive to this portrait.

FOREWORD

“Once upon a time on October 23.

A good day, like a very personal punctuation of life. On October 23, Maurice Renoma was born. On October 23, Maurice Renoma opened his now legendary fashion boutique, 129bis rue de la Pompe. On October 23, the Hotel Renoma was inaugurated, in the heart of Tel Aviv, Israel, 23 rooms, 23 apartments. And so on. From 23, you get everything. Maurice Renoma believes in numbers and does not budge. He talks about luck, guardian angels, not chance, he insists, or else a chance that always does things well. […] He says he doesn’t like to listen or answer questions, and in fact, when he and I talk for hours, every time he will lead the conversation. In his own way: forwards, backwards, and hop, a side step. And always the charm that operates: under chaotic airs, he knows how to calculate the other and assume his own contradictions, no doubt even maintains them because he savors nothing so much as losing his interlocutor in the nets of his mischievous equations…”

– Sonia Rachline