A painting carries within itself nostalgia for that which wished to be expressed and finally could not be said. Nostalgia for a different reality, a moment perceived and impossible to transcribe. There is suffering in the process of the birth of an image, suffering in the constant uncertainty found at each step. At the best moment, the one we call 'the man of art' becomes an instrument through which movement and energy take form.

The painter is at once midwife, juggler, and beggar; he portrays the invisible, the world of hidden emotion stamped in each human being. This is how the painter 'represents': he brings to life that which others before him have sung—as it is, in fact, a question of sound, ringing in different epochs on different instruments, but never repeated.

— Paul Reynard, January 15, 1996
 

Reynard was a gifted craftsman and an inspired abstractionist, able to conjure forms that flow and burgeon with emphatic but graceful energy. But the larger public never came to Reynard’s work, partly because he never sought the limelight (if anything, he shunned it), and partly because what he did transcended what most preoccupied the public at any given moment. Over almost a half century, Reynard’s art responded, however obliquely, to many of the artistic tendencies with which it coincided, but fit neatly into none of them.

As a producer of Visual art, of objects, Reynard was impelled not by the need to make things, but to explore the human ramifications—the spiritual resonance, the intellectual substance—of those things. He looked for such resonance and substance in artworks by others and he looked to invest his own artwork with such resonance and substance.

— Peter Frank
from "Painting and Beyond"
in Paul Reynard: Works in America