Meeting & Signing · FKDL and Joachim Romain

The Bookshop is pleased to welcome FKDL and Joachim Romain on Saturday 13th May from 3pm to 6pm for a signing session on the occasion of the exhibition Seconde vie, l’art de recycler which is currently taking place on Fluctuart. On the program : books, art editions and originals will be presented. A privileged moment with these two artists not to be missed !

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

FKDL
Franck Duval started painting in the 80s. Fashion design, circus arts and cinema, which he has also tried his hand at, have always influenced his work. During the 2000s, under the name of FKDL, he explored the Scotch Art* technique. He then increasingly frequented the urban art scene and stuck his first black silhouettes in Paris in 2006. Fascinated by the period press, he sees in the iconography of the 20s to the 70s the paper cloths with which he adorns his characters. Going out into the street made him discover a form of sharing that he never tires of. Since then, he has diversified his characters, made them travel, and made them grow in size. The muralist that he has become participates in numerous projects and collaborations.
*Art Scotch: created by Joseph Gil Wolman in 1963

JOACHIM ROMAIN
Joachim Romain focuses on the layers of information present in posters, elements of a society of mass consumption. His interest in natural urban wear and tear as well as the diversity of typography across the world and the ages has led him to experiment with tearing up posters in the street. In a certain filiation with the artists of the New Realism Movement, such as Villéglé and Hains, he works with what the city offers him as materials. Initially, photography enabled him to record his observations of urban poster walls. He now uses it to reveal our era in which our eyes are constantly caught up in images both in cities and on websites, inciting a shopping frenzy. From this attention emerged his series Fast shop (2009) made from shots of online sales sites. His images reveal bodies, models of brands almost disappearing, an expression of the excessive speed of a consumer trend. The brilliance of the photographic print accentuates the effect of sublimation, of the attraction of the advertising image, as it would be seen on a screen.

Little by little, Joachim Romain associates this work with the urban world and damages his own photographs, thus testifying to the effects of time. He releases a pictorial gesture to reinforce the layers of poster material collected in the street. His portraits, inserted into this accumulation of advertising images, melt into the quantity of coloured textures and fragments of typography. He pursues his artistic practice on the walls of free posters by creating sculptures from what humans create and recompose as they collage posters, giving rise to a palimpsest of forms and textures that deteriorate over time. His works in the public space allow us to imagine the traces of natural phenomena, winds, tornadoes, tremors… In the pursuit of his experiments in the use of society’s waste, concerned with ecology and the environment, the artist affirms an artistic practice increasingly based on the principle of the short circuit. Combining his photographs and his work on materials found in the street, he extends his experiments in recomposing posters by merging his Fast Shop series with his reworked collages of torn posters. His works tell of a state of cities marked by the accumulation of images, slogans and posters, which attract our attention and solicit a desire to buy, provoking a flow of fabrications, then waste. Over the years, his works will become archives of the world, like relics of an era of too many images. Pauline Lisowski (art critic)