Romain Grateau

Grand tourisme à injec­tion , 2021
Reinforced con­crete book­case: Portland cement, sand, min­eral fillers, steel, oxides and pig­ments, encaustic, c. 300 x 215 x 35 cm

An in situ work that will store the col­lec­tion of books and doc­u­ments of Bétonsalon, this book­case by Romain Grateau is a knowing pun on the art centre’s name, a lit­er­al­ized vision of the form that un salon en béton [a con­crete living-room] might take. A self-sup­porting struc­ture, the book­case extends and appro­pri­ates the func­tional archi­tec­ture of the space through its mod­u­la­tion of hor­i­zontal lines and sup­port mod­ules. Combining tapered and squat columns with slightly skewed mod­ules whose forms are at once rough and del­i­cate, the dif­ferent pro­cesses used to create this unit are clearly vis­ible in the fin­ished piece, offering a mul­ti­plicity of pos­sible vari­a­tions upon a mate­rial that is usu­ally syn­ony­mous with stan­dard­ized indus­trial pro­duc­tion. Grateau plays with numerous den­si­ties, colour­ings, fin­ishes and embedded ele­ments, chal­lenging our per­cep­tion and our ability to sep­a­rate rubble from art object. By com­bining careful touches of orna­men­ta­tion with the heavy-duty tech­niques of con­struc­tion, he blends genres and reg­is­ters from masonry to self-build and from Rocaille to bru­talism. The title of the work, drawn from the world of auto­mo­biles, refers to a tech­nology that allows vehi­cles to travel long dis­tances at high speeds. Grateau’s book­case invokes this mix­ture of poetry, pre­ci­sion, power and mechanics, whilst sub­verting a form of mas­culinity anchored in bodily exer­tion and phys­ical feats.

Mathilde Belouali-Dejean

Romain Grateau, born in 1991 in Ancenis (depart­ment 44 - France), lives and works in the Paris sub­urbs.
He grad­u­ated with a DNAP (National Diploma in Visual Art) from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Angers in 2012 and obtained a DNSEP (Higher National Diploma in Visual Expression) from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Lyon in 2014. He then earned a Master’s in Visual Arts from the Head, Geneva, in 2016.

Romain Grateau develops a sculp­tural prac­tice pri­marily guided by the sen­su­ality of the mate­rials and self-taught skills and pop­ular, archaic crafts tech­niques. In par­allel he works on text and poetry.
Since 2019, he has been a member of Pauline Perplexe, a work­shop and exhi­bi­tion space man­aged by artists, located in Arcueil (depart­ment 94 - France). He par­tic­i­pates in numerous group pro­jects, par­tic­u­larly focusing on cura­tion.