Ceysson & Bénétière

Ceysson & Benetiere gallery is pleased to announce the upcoming exhibition of Nicolas Momein in the Domaine de Panery. 

Nicolas Momein's artistic practice often unfolds from the study of trivial and functional objects and materials - from agricultural equipment for shoeing cows to slippers, from cotton bath towels to living room sofas, encompassing various materials: salt stone, soap, leather, rock wool, etc. - and develops through the identification of gestures and techniques derived from industry or craftsmanship. This almost anthropological approach is associated with constantly renewed learning because the artist must understand and adopt these gestures, reuse these machines, collaborate with workers or artisans, in short, put himself in the position of making, undoing, or reshaping these objects and materials. Nicolas Momein creatively and freely reinvests a wide range of techniques and know-how, diverting them from their original purposes.

For the development of his recent series "Skin to Skin," initiated in 2022 during a residency in partnership with a factory specializing in the treatment and finishing of leathers and skins, the artist explores the properties and pictorial potentials of pigmented aluminum sheets intended for industrial lamination. These sheets, covered with a film of colored metallic pigment, are used by the leather industry to transfer and fix bright colors onto coated supports through thermal application. Nicolas Momein appropriates this material for treating and ornamenting the surfaces of manufactured products by modifying the mechanical stamping process. Thus, operating cold, by directly pressing pigmented sheets onto canvas or vinyl surfaces, he blindly transfers his manual, directed but unplanned tracings. The highly colored works unfold as improvisations, composed of rhythmic variations of gestures, between ornamental abstraction and primitive figuration, seismographic writing, and pictorial flatness. While these strange baroque and flamboyant landscapes reveal a stratigraphy of accumulated traces in layers, they belong to a superficial filmic structure. Indeed, the technical process prevents the superposition of applications: each transfer of colored material is therefore definitive and cannot be removed or covered. And though these pieces resemble paintings, they are structured like marquetry of small skins (films) of metallic pigments that fit perfectly into a surface, on their support. But these films wrinkle, mark, sometimes even seem hammered, and ambiguously gain thickness... like tanned skins, or discreetly stamped industrial metal matrices bearing patterns of textile ornamentation.

This series is part of the continuation of his research during an artistic residency organized by the art center Le Lait in Graulhet, where Nicolas Momein began working with the "Eureka" factory specialized in thinning and finishing leathers and skins. From laceration to delicate gesture, the works explore the intimate relationship between support and medium. It is this hybrid language, between technique and poetic extrapolation, that Momein proposes to question through this new series produced between the factory and the studio for his upcoming exhibition at Ceysson & Bénétière in April.