JOACHIM ROMAIN

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Joachim Romain is an artist who explores the layers of information present in posters, revealing the facets of a mass consumer society. Inspired by natural urban wear and tear and the diversity of typography across time and place, Joachim Romain creates experiments in poster tearing in public spaces.

 

Following in the footsteps of the Nouveau Réalisme movement and artists such as Villéglé and Hains, Joachim Romain works with the materials the city offers him. Initially, Joachim Romain used photography to record his observations of urban poster walls, but he has now adopted it to capture our age, when images overwhelm us, whether in cities or on the internet, sparking a frenzy of shopping.

 

His Fastshop series (2009) is based on photographs of online sales sites. These images reveal bodies, models of brands, that seem almost to disappear, reflecting the excessive speed of the consumer trend. The glossy photographic prints accentuate the effect of sublimation, reinforcing the appeal of advertising images as they would appear on a screen.

 

Over the years, Joachim Romain has linked his work to the urban world by damaging his own photographs, thus bearing witness to the effects of time. He creates portraits inserted into an accumulation of advertising images, blending into the multitude of colored textures and fragments of typography. Joachim Romain continues his artistic practice by creating sculptures from materials collected in the street, giving life to a palimpsest of shapes and textures that deteriorate over time.

 

His works in public spaces evoke the traces of natural phenomena such as winds, tornadoes and earthquakes. Committed to ecology and the environment, Joachim Romain is increasingly basing his artistic practice on the principle of the short circuit, using society's scraps. Combining his photographs with his work on materials found on the street, Joachim Romain merges his Fastshop series with his collages of reworked torn posters.

 

Through his creations, Joachim Romain depicts cities marked by the accumulation of images, slogans and posters that solicit our attention and incite the desire to buy, generating a constant flow of production and waste. Over time, his works become archives of the world, relics of an era when images were omnipresent.

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