The Musée Marmottan Monet invites the artist Jean Pierre Raynaud for the fourth edition of its "Unexpected Dialogues". It is almost sixty years since Jean-Pierre Raynaud appeared on the artistic scene with a body of work that is exclusively concerned with the object. We can therefore rightly wonder about his participation in this series of dialogues that the Musée Marmottan Monet has decided to set up in confrontation with the work of the painter of Impressionism and the Water Lilies. By choosing the Water Lilies painting of 1917-1919 as the subject of the dialogue, the museum is taking on a work by Claude Monet whose exclusive subject is painting for its own sake. If, for Jean Pierre Raynaud, this invitation is more of an encounter than a dialogue, strictly speaking, it is first and foremost because the artist wants to avoid any misunderstanding: the fact that he is not a painter in no way prevents him from addressing the question of painting. This is what he has done, explicitly, on several occasions during his career and in his own way. The fact that Jean-Pierre Raynaud has chosen to reactivate the concept of his "painting project" in a new, even more radical formulation, by hanging a series of his pots on a dedicated surface, underlines the relevance of a posture that refutes all seduction. A gesture, a simple gesture. With him more than anyone else, the experience of art ensures that the viewer does not emerge unscathed, and therefore gains an additional sense of being. This, at least, is the basis of Claude Monet's work in its plastic invention and its dual invitation to reflection and wonder. The Water Lilies project has an unprecedented history, from the digging of an artificial pond to the construction of an immense studio to offer painting an unlimited panorama. A place, or even an environment of its own. Jean Pierre Raynaud's proposal is based on the same desire to embrace space through the idea of painting - painting alone. Unexpected dialogue? A meeting? It doesn't matter. The fact is that painting is both pretext and text, subject and object. For the pleasure of the eyes and the mind.