Event – 2014 – Jean-baptiste Farkas – Slowmo: “Le ralentisseur” (The speed bump)
Event – 2014 – Anne Favret & Patrick Manez presentation and signing of “Les Arpenteurs” book
Les Frères Ripoulain
Univers parallèle
Vernissage Saturday, October 4, 2014, at 7:00 pm
Our proposal for the Eva Vautier gallery is entitled Univers parallèle. It is a contextual painting on glass, based on the aerosol drawing technique used by market painters to depict landscapes. The painting is created inside the gallery’s display case, then completely covered with black paint once finished, so that it can only be read from the outside, accentuating the spatial and mystical dimension of this graphic universe.
Univers parallèle is a proposal that echoes the issues raised by the Market Zone project: it questions what globalization is doing to vernacular know-how, and how the market, as a space, makes it possible to preserve and renew practices halfway between applied art, craftsmanship and spectacular industrial production.
Given that the vernacular was originally the product of a community, and therefore of a territory, we might assume that this market space is, in the face of the consumer society and mass retailing (which levels down all territorial specificities and alienates them from the imperatives of tourist folklore), a “nomadic territory” with its own – commercial – modalities of existence, which have remained almost unchanged since the 1960s.
These conditions would have enabled a body of practices halfway between art and craft to survive, and even remain intact, which would otherwise probably have disappeared: what was originally known as street art (street art street performers (street performers landscape painters, statues that come to life for a few coins, caricaturists, portraitists and silhouetters who sketch in a hurry, extended to the drawers of chalk frescoes on the macadam, pocket magicians and other puppet demonstrators, to name but a few. What they have in common, if not a recycling of forms borrowed from various disciplinary fields – mainly the history of painting and theater – is a creative imperative unilaterally geared towards subsistence, and therefore profitability. And this condition of existence, linked to immediate commercialization, confers on these practices the character of brief, spectacular forms, insofar as they dramatize know-how in order to attract customers. In fact, they are akin to demonstration or performance, because they have to be itinerant and easily reproducible, with an economy of means that depends on the limited production conditions available to their performers, and the limited attention that passers-by will devote to them. These itinerant practices are globalized in the sense that they flourish and recur throughout the world.
We took a few images of these spray can artists (as they’ve been known since the seventies), who wield the spray paint can with more than dexterity and cunning, on the markets. We found as many of them in Saint-Malo as in Belgrade or New York. Their pictorial style, while partly constrained by the technical properties of aerosol – rapid drying, immediate coverage, the texture and plasticity of solvent-based paint, which enables them to replay, on a smaller scale, the material effects used by fresco and trompe-l’œil painters, and an industrial color range, since the drawing tools are diverted from their primary use – also induces a connotative, technological and futuristic universe, but one that remains a stylistic exercise based on the archetypal subject of classical painting, the landscape.
With Univers parallèle, we are attempting to free this pictorial style from the creative formatting to which it is subjected by commercial imperatives. Our gesture shifts this graphic universe from the horizontal to the vertical, from the object to be hung at home to the shop window, from the scale of the “take-away format” to the human scale of the installation. It restores a “gratuity” as much as a complexity, by asserting the relationship between transparency-opacity and right-side-up as the hypothetically unsurpassable frontier or hypothesis of an impossible reconciliation between two parallel – and supposedly antagonistic – universes, the street and the gallery, each of which generates its own modalities for the creation and reception of art. By extension, Univers parallèle also points to the gap between two conceptions of painting – Sunday vs. salon, popular vs. elite – where the difference between decorative and aesthetic functions has historically played itself out. On one side of the glass wall, abstract forms, mute because they summon up the transcendence of the subject and the autonomy of the pictorial gesture in art history; on the other, figurative, decorative and vernacular forms showing a certain vulgar complacency (in the sense of vulgus, common) for technique, the prerogative of amateur art.
Les Frères Ripoulain (Mathieu Tremblin and David Renault), Arles, July 2014.
http://www.lesfreresripoulain.eu
http://thankyouforcoming.net/les-freres-ripoulain
BIOGRAPHY
LONG VERSION
“Two of them, David Renault and Mathieu Tremblin, are putting a new coat of paint on the more than one-hundred-year-old paint manufacturer’s trademark, a reappropriation already carried out by the 1980s collective, the Frères Ripoulin, and a tribute.
plus, and a street that has since become despoiled, that has produced “neighborhoods” and seen graffiti flourish, these ripoulains have combined their energy and complementary skills in diverse, multidirectional practices, which take place in the public space, the street, the city, in the form of intervention, even activism.”
Christophe Domino, 2011
David Renault and Mathieu Tremblin met at university in Rennes in 1999, and formed the duo Les Frères Ripoulain in 2006. In 2012, they joined the Documents d’Artistes Bretagne network, and in 2014 the international Free Art and Technology (FAT) network.
Working solo or as a duo under the pseudonym Les Frères Ripoulain, they favor contextual forms of creation whose modus operandi is similar to that of city workers, as evidenced by their consultancy spaces inspired by design offices, where they explore the relationship between urbanity and urbanism through fieldwork and work in progress.
David Renault and Mathieu Tremblin work in the city’s fallow spaces, developing urban action protocols around notions of counterfeiting, abandonment and degradation, autonomous and spontaneous expression, cryptic language and civil disobedience.
Les Frères Ripoulain
David RENAULT & Mathieu TREMBLIN
Duo formed in 2006 in Rennes (FR)