Miguel Nùñez Rauschert

Miguel Nuñez Rauschert has been holding a paintbrush since childhood. Originally from Montevideo, Uruguay, he trained in visual arts in Buenos Aires, where he presented his first exhibitions. He then moved to Paris in 1982, where he settled and pursued a career as a visual artist and professor at the Carrousel workshops of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs.

 

A painter of the “Human Comedy,” he has long explored the interplay between the hidden and the revealed, in troubling tensions of seduction and rejection, desire and indifference: bodies caught in the moment of a dance step or a pirouette, in the caress of water or sunlight, in the tension of pain, in a gesture of resistance or revolt, in the abandonment of reverie. These are bodies inscribed in compart-mentalized spaces, simultaneously deconstructed and balanced.

Portraits, too — with their determined or pensive gazes — seem imbued with the weight of existence, bearing the charge of emotion and the cracks of experience: slices of life captured in their mystery and incommunicability.

 

In more recent works, he brings to life boats, ocean liners, and ocean-going cargo ships: enigmatic, solitary masses balanced between liquid and air. As a counter-point, we find the fragile silhouette of a man facing the sea, a dim streetlamp, or the broken line of a quay fragmenting the frame.

 

The city has now entered his painting as the fullest metaphor of his existential quest. A chaotic conglomeration, seemingly impenetrable yet contained within a harmonious geometry that tends toward abstraction, the city becomes a space of tension and breathing room — a backdrop for the anonymous dreamer, the fur-tive cyclist, the bus passenger glimpsed behind a window, the absorbed walker, the pensive observer of a world represented as both refuge and prison, stopover and confinement.

 

It is color that gives Miguel Nuñez Rauschert’s work its ferment of energy. With a particularly rich palette, he works the material with a knife, superimposing layers on the canvas and scraping them to achieve subtle transparencies in a powerful and sensual shimmer. From this rough material, light emerges — shrouded in sensuality.

Through this coexistence between the vitality of color and the cutouts of compo-sition, between the power of natural or architectural elements and the discreet presence of the passerby, the passenger, the dreamer — “our fellow human being, our brother” — Miguel Nuñez Rauschert’s painting questions the fragile tenacity of our lives and invites meditation on purpose.

 

The music of his paintings is silence — a grave and questioning silence.

 

Jean-Paul MAS, September 2025