Raymond Hains - Les tuyauteries du centre

Raymond Hains was born in Saint-Brieuc, France, in 1926 and died in 2005. He lived and worked in Paris and Nice. He was one of the founding members of the Nouveau Réalisme movement. He became known for his hoarding works and torn posters, whose metal frames he kept or transferred to canvas. Hains followed an unusual artistic path centring on word play, hypnagogic photographs (with fragments of glass), associations of ideas and found objects.

The occasion of the exhibition, The center’s pipe, is also an occasion for recounting footnotes to or anecdotes about Raymond Hain’s recent works, those he henceofrth describes as « macintoshages ».

The word, from then on at the center of Raymond Hain’s intellectual mechanism, allwos him to erect worlds at the interior of the world, or perhaps to even reveal an aspect of the world itself. Plays on words, verbal or visual puns, association of ideas are governed by chance, a chance qualified as objective. For, if a semantic chaos without end develops, it is so he can capitamize on the « intrinsic expressivity of the real », even if it means making this real abstract or this abstraction real and, in the end, « looking at the world like a painting ».