Rémi Tamain :
Remi Tamain belongs to this generation of artists who have fun of the referential echoes of art history and works promoted to the rank of icon and recognizable by all.
These references are articulated from a global cultural “history” as clichés of social class, of being or not being of a seraglio that everything separates.
Even if he plays with these cultural codes, with these comings and goings, he focuses more on objects or productions such as end of the century bathroom cabins, or the idea of French gardens where Alice gets lost, rather than on pictorial works as such.
From shifted situations linked to his own origin and social condition, Rémi Tamain elaborates a set of objects, photographs, sculptures, and constitutes with each production, an additional element of his vocabulary and a personal syntax. It is this friction of the origins with his artistic practice which constitutes at this moment the source of his imagination and produces a smile, a laughter freed from its grease.
Here, no incongruity, but the support of an elegant humor which marks out all his work in construction, of which The nest, contains in one piece the graceful humor and the formal grind of his productions. This landscape ornamentation, like a phalanstery, offers the birds a living and working space in harmony with this welcoming land.
These new homes, a kind of low-cost housing, are hung on the apple tree in a space that one suspects is for private contemplation. This outdoor hanging is a sort of “formal notice” of the circus references that mark out Remi Tamain’s work and of this obligation to dress, to elegance that constitutes it and that his work sometimes imposes as a “Miroir aux alouettes”.
The a priori edutainment aspect of Rémi Tamain’s work sometimes conceals a look charged with a black mood and a poetic nostalgia, but whose politeness of humor avoids pathos.
Languor of which some of Rémi Tamain’s contemporary peers form a whole, from Erwin Wurm to Philippe Ramette or older ones, like Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati.
La Porcherie :
This place, in the heart of the Côte d’Or, is so named because of its history. From the end of the 19th century until the 1950’s, it was a place of transit for pigs (about 350 to 400 pigs passed through its walls) and then it received sheep for the same trade. In 1963 the owners created a building materials business. This last one, bought in 1980 by my parents will last until mid 2007.
The place of exhibition and experimentation of contemporary art that I wished took the place of cinder blocks.
Why this name, La Porcherie, you may ask? Very simply because the place has not lost its original layout, that is to say that the stalls are still there after a little century and that the soul of the pigs still floats.
My will, in this space which proposes several rooms (large and small as well as an outside in the presence of an orchard also almost centenary), is to present young artists and to leave them, as much as possible, the broadest latitudes. But also more renowned artists who wish to participate in this adventure. Insofar as dialogue is necessary, why not put novices and confirmed artists in contact?
This place is a chance for me and I have to share it. It is a studio, but it can also be the place of experimentation of various artists.
La Porcherie. is a kind of “no man’s land”. Indeed, it is on one side open towards the old national 5 which borders it and on the other it opens on the fields; between urbanity and rurality, such is its place. It is a laboratory of ideas which is nourished by those of 96 artists having already worked in or out of the place since 14 years. It is a place of artistic discovery for some 328,000 visitors. And it is a fantastic space, as much as the one who created it.
The space consists of rooms ranging from 25 to 200m2 and an orchard of about 5000m2.
From a practical point of view, La Porcherie is located at 2h30 from Paris and Lyon, 3h30 from Geneva by the A6 freeway, 1h from Paris by the SNCF station of Montbard, 2h55 from Brussels and 30min from Dijon by the SNCF station of Les Laumes/Alésia.
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Rémi Tamain
Plastic artist
P/ +33(0)6 343 369 91
tamainremi@gmail.com
www.remitamain.com
