Joachim Romain

Description

The work of French artist Joachim Romain begins where most viewers stop looking: in the layered residue of advertising posters, hand-bills and stickers that accumulate, peel and tear on the walls of modern cities. From his studio in Saint-Denis, Romain has spent more than a decade treating the urban surface as a found archive—a slow, anonymous palimpsest in which corporate communication, political slogans, personal voices and accidents of weather form their own unintended compositions. His method is one of subtraction rather than addition. He lifts and reassembles fragments of the city’s printed skin, picking up where postwar artists of the torn poster left off. In works such as the one on view, Romain pushes that lineage into three dimensions: torn fragments leave the wall and enter the room, engaging the visitor in space rather than in the flat field of the picture. The result is a dramatic, organic sculpture that crystallises the dynamics of the street into something close to an explosion frozen in time and space. In Völklingen, his piece enters into dialogue with another kind of layered surface: a heritage site whose walls and machines are themselves a stratigraphy of industrial labour and post-industrial memory.