One may sometimes wonder if artists actually understand what they are doing. I have often been surprised by the contrast between Jean-Xavier Renaud's mild demeanour and his drawings. I was taken aback the first time I saw them, perhaps five years ago now. Little ballpoint pen sketches, biting and vengeful. They look like bad boy drawings – things seen and heard on television, in the street, at the local supermarket, or jokes that one mutters to oneself but dares not share in public. This, combined with quite a variable form of expression that ranges from quick sketches with no artistic intent to very meticulous, almost hyper-realistic pieces of draughtsmanship. These differences in style seem to follow the variations of his thoughts. There is no hierarchy between the scenes, as if they coexisted within an enormous bubble, with the artist as its scrupulous chronicler. One may see it as a picture diary, a collection of notes and meditations, a sort of scrapbook made from whatever thoughts pass through his head, and which one is given to see in various formats and various techniques (ballpoint pen sketches, watercolours, oil pastel or oils on canvas).

The joyous liveliness of his drawings does, however, allow for some darkness. They all rely on a vision of human relationships in which rudeness has replaced politeness and violence replaced indifference, with a jaunty and highly refreshing ferociousness devoid of any sentimentality. While his drawings and paintings do not depict anything one would like to experience (they are basically a faithful description of hell), they do, however, express a sense of freedom and carefreeness that I have never seen anywhere else. There is nothing stuffy about them, nothing politically correct, and yet they remain very lifelike. Like life inside a video game, where one can very easily do things that would be very unpleasant in real life, like killing or dying – heavy and distressing occurrences that the game allows for over and over again, not only painlessly, but also with a certain degree of pleasure.

Style or, to be more precise, a variety of styles, makes it possible to infiltrate not only the ideas one has, but also the ideas one tries to avoid having. In this theatre of the absurd, anyone will recognise the way thoughts segue into one another once they are no longer used in the context of action. In this case, the individual is not the artist, but rather the spectator. Through a curious process of self-erasure, and without any specific indication of how or why, he seems to make way for the subjects that populate his drawings. Perhaps because of the stylistic freedom. These are pictures rife with references to advertising and television, which the artist seems to collect with the placid voracity of a vacuum sucking up dust balls from under a neglected couch. The bubble is no longer a pretty bubble, but a bloated, indifferent and cruel sack.

This results in a kind of waste system located outside of the commercial economy of images, as if the subjects of these works themselves belonged to the invisible world of rejects. They fascinate us and we enjoy them because they relieve us of everything we absorb on a daily basis: beauty as a criterion, politeness, reserve, respect as a quality, silence, and, generally speaking, suffocation. A rabbit caged in a barbed wire enclosure with carrots as pickets is, for reasons I cannot explain, a precise and powerful image of the lives we lead. A portrait whose almond-shaped eyes are replaced by real painted almonds says a lot about the close-mindedness to which images and metaphors keep us confined.

What is unexpected isn't the scathing humour of his works (Sandra Cattini compares him to Willem, the brilliant cartoonist from the newspaper Libération), so much as his way of drawing as if it were the only manner in which to contain the flurry of reality. Jean-Xavier Renaud seldom filters anything out. He indiscriminately reproduces snatches of conversations overheard in the street and the sections of bodies and faces that advertising tries to sell us. All these elements are woven together with cold, technical draughtsmanship, at times falsely naïve and at others meticulous. This level of availability and attention sets his work apart from most others, which often conform to a kind of specialisation, a more or less acute problematic that is hardly up to date, slightly boring, and which ends up letting life fly by like a dreadful and gigantic missed opportunity. In the case of these drawings, there is no time for understanding. Each of them seems to have come a long way and to be headed very far, although none of them, in their details, feels unfamiliar.

And so we let ourselves get carried away on this endless journey, this story without morals in which everything is jumbled together. Private, public, old, and new, yet always linked to the immediate world. A world in which there is no other culture than that of frenzied consumerism and a instinct for survival that makes men (or women) and mushrooms closer relatives than expected, quite willing to devour one another and to be devoured by anything that comes their way, despite no one having a clue as to what this might be. This is, at any rate, what appears in his drawings, which are like symptoms of generalised cruelty, of the fragility of relationships, and even of the extended thread, of the razorblade that runs through life, reality, and all these things that are so difficult to identify. In short, I am not sure if Jean-Xavier Renaud knows what he is doing. His drawings are meteorites flying over our heads without us having any idea of what they contain. Our life? The life of others? Which others? We aren't quite certain of anything anymore.