Maxime Drouet

Description

The installation can now only be seen online in the Mediaguide.

In an installation in the Black Room of the Ironworks with reverse glass painting on train windows and doors, as well as video and sound sequences, Maxime Drouet reflects on the historical and cultural foundation of contemporary urban art, which remains current in the present day: graffiti on trains. Developed and perfected by often underprivileged young New Yorkers on subway cars until around the mid-1980s, graffiti then spread worldwide as the globe’s most significant visual sub- and counterculture. Drouet’s artistic development also passed through the school of this “train bombing.” He has recognized what is important in transporting graffiti into the exhibition space. He abstracts and translates the experience, as controversial as it is sublime, of being confronted with an oversized, illegally painted, rolling wall of paint that suddenly pulls in and – according to writer and director Norman Mailer – “brightens the place like a bouquet from Latin American.” Drouet says he roams train graveyards “like a ghost,” trying to revive what he loved. Here he captures “the last moments of trains, when their mechanical souls unite with and extinguish their last colorful tributes.”  

Sound: DJ Pone