Jean-Philippe Robert Geenen, son of Romaine Delhaye and Louis Geenen, known as Jean Raine, was born in Schaerbeek (Belgium) on January 24, 1927.
He participates as a poet and a film director in the COBRA Movement.
Very interested in surrealism he meets René Magritte in Brussels. From his arrival in Paris he visits André Breton who introduces him to the Doctor Pierre Mabille. The latter helps Jean Raine to shoot his first documentary on The “Test du Village”.
All his life Jean Raine writes poems and texts, but gradually words seem insufficient and he sets to drawing, and then painting.
In 1962 his friend Marcel Broodthaers introduces him to Philippe Toussaint, owner of the Saint Laurent Gallery in Brussels, where takes place his first exhibition prefaced by Marcel Lecomte. His works can now be found in numerous museums and private collections.
“His accomplished painting amuses him.”- said Bertrand Puvis de Chavannes.
“He provokes in his essays to the point of physical extermination of provocateur! To be a mediator between the most archaic in the human being, “the animal”, and “the enlightened being” – that is the role that Jean Raine assigns to an artist who has “to be different from the others by every possible means”.
Published in the Jean Raine exhibition catalogue, retrospective of works 1944-1986, Contemporary Art Centre, in Saint-Priest, February – April 1988.
