Through his use of installation and video, Rémi Groussin creates plastic scenarios that draw on artistic, cinematic and televisual references (TV shows, science fiction films, advertisement), and which appeal directly to the viewer’s perception, in a game of illusions and factitious mise en scenes. The notion of decor (and of façade, rigging or illusion) is a recurrent motif in his practice, thanks to his use of scale variations and his interaction with the spaces he occupies.
His forms, video installations, neon signs, pinball machines, and other objects inspired by an aesthetic of vernacular ordinariness and deliberately poor artifice, are the result of collecting, reuse and assemblage. They never fulfil their primary function and highlight a defective but resistant mechanism, which, through its uselessness, questions our relationship to the living world.
Ultimately, it is reality that Rémi Groussin observes and questions through a play on narration, in which fiction inevitably meets reality.

Translated by Lucy Pons
Biographical notes translated with the support of the Centre national des arts plastiques

Materials and techniques

Lights, electricity, re-use, the space, the architecture, the landscape, the real

Handiworks

To deconstruct, to rebuild, to assemble, to collect

Key words

Site specific, context, scale, lights

Quotations

“Here is what we have to offer you in its most elaborate form : confusion guided by a clear sense of purpose”, Gordon Matta Clark;

“Tout l’espace est parsemé, constellé et infesté de petites flammes qui ressemblent à des lucioles, exactement comme celles que les gens à la campagne, par les belles nuits d’été, voient voleter, ici et là, au grès de leurs splendeurs discrètes, passantes, saccadées.”, Georges Didi-Huberman, Survivance des lucioles, 2009, Les éditions de Minuit;

“La grande enseigne surgit pour relier la route au magasin. […]
Le signe graphique dans l’espace est devenu l’architecture de ce paysage.”, Robert Venturi, Learning from Las Vegas;

“L’aube vient. Il est courant qu’aucun démon ne soutient son approche, sa pâleur, son glissement bleuâtre ; mais on ne parle jamais de démons translucides qui l’apportent amoureusement. Un bleu d’adieux, étouffé, étalé par le brouillard, pénètre avec des bouffées de brume.”, Colette, La Naissance du jour, éditions Garnier;

“More and more, it seems to me, light is the beautifier of the building”, Frank Lloyd Wright