Nails in mouth
For the past fifteen years, Nicolas Momein has been expanding the possibilities of sculpture. His work is bold and hungry for new mediums and techniques, encompassing many disciplines while freely hybridizing fine and applied arts, as well as craft, industrial and agricultural techniques. The artist gleefully short-circuits hierarchies, yet with tactfulness and gentleness when it comes to breaking down the barriers between specialized trades associated with particular social classes and divides. Seamstresses, sandblasters, upholsterers, clog makers, tanners, scrap dealers, welders, soap makers, cabinetmakers, metal platers… the artist works with these craftspeople on the basis of barter, collaboration, and expertise sharing.
Before turning to art, Nicolas Momein worked for several years as an upholsterer. Watching an old video in which he hammers a line of brass tacks into a scarlet bench, he laughs at this “voodoo upholsterer” working with nails in mouth. This artisanal training, long hidden and kept to himself, often resurfacing in the form of sculptural slips now re-emerges and fills up his practice. A professional shapeshifter constantly navigating between high and low cultures, the artist subverts the persistent divide between fine art and craft still fraught with constraints. Today, to embrace this lineage means for him a kind of professional coming out, expressed through works in transition, which exuberance proudly thwart their minimalist origin. Blisters, bulges, gleams, fluorescence, fringes, and other flights of fancy adorn and disguise the expected sobriety of his sculptures, revealing a domestic, grotesque, cartoonish, and perhaps even queer turn in his work..
The human and animal body is omnipresent in Momein’s work. His small resin sculptures titled Knots -colorful, puckered swellings resembling navels- form a family of casts created out latex gloves, swim caps, and condoms. Elsewhere, textiles, padding, and frames evoke skin, flesh, and bone. The artist performs incisions, stitching and stuffing gestures midway between upholstery, painting, and sculpture. Padded stretchers are upholstered with terry towels, patterned sheets, or paint-splattered work jeans (work overall): the artist’s “trousseau” as painting.
Other paintings in volume are entirely covered with animal hair -cow and horse mixed- usually used in upholstery for chair stuffing, but here exposed as thick, unruly pelts (entitled “Crin – Un pré”). In other works, burlap stretched over spherical padding is adorned with pointed studs (upholstery nails), visible seams, and metal eyelets (“Du crin dans les yeux”).
Momein’s recent works entitled “Bâtons de plis” without stretchers or stuffing retain only the “skin” of the paintings: the faux leather on which the artist first applied paint, silkscreen, and transfers, is later cut into strips and transformed into sleeves, threaded and pleated along long “necklaces.” These discarded skins or paint scalps become like fetishes: playful trophies, triumphant over good taste and formal categories.
Hélène Meisel