It is said that culture is never far from the places where it is taught. Just two windows away from the Lycée Masséna—where curious and unruly students might even catch a glimpse if they lean out slightly—the Frémiot Gallery (remi.fremiot@wanadoo.fr), named after its owner, set up its quarters last year. Both ancient and contemporary paintings, art objects, and curiosities from around the world adorned the whitewashed walls bathed in soft lighting until recently. Twelve months later, Rémi Frémiot takes stock: he decides to “open up to his era” and “fit into the line.” This is how he offers Olivier Briand, known artistically as Romten, to take over his gallery space for a month. Why him? “Beyond his talent,” explains the gallery owner, his work extends and renews contemporary art as known since the London School.
Gone are the old, cracked portraits of young devout with blue eyes in ecstatic prayer or the self-portraits of Russian painters sketching in the Moscow snow. A new approach to pictoriality sets the tone for this exhibition open to the public until January 31.
At 29, Olivier Briand has already pursued a university degree in Plastic Arts at the University of Aix en Provence and a high-level musical education, since he won the gold medal from the Conservatory in the same city. A musician and composer better known as Romten, he performs under the “phonetik” label, well-known to the Nice audience for his regular concerts. Romten’s electronic music is based on repetitive loops, while Olivier Briand’s pictorial work involves entanglements of motifs, a double confluence of musical rhythms and graphics scanning.
To understand Olivier Briand’s art requires listening to Romten’s music. “I create ‘drawings that are listened to’,” the artist indeed declares. Generally reserved, he becomes enthusiastic on this topic: “A line, a stroke are expressive enough.” “I was born in an electric era: there were only electric lamps when I came out of my mother’s womb.”
His “nighttime gas station” indeed strikingly resembles a surgical operation room…
From his paintings, especially in his large formats which represent the real success of the exhibition, man appears furtively, fearful of his own solitude, a frail element lost in the vastness of urban life. A vision of the future that already belongs to the present. It could be nightmarish. Olivier Briand knows how to render it aesthetic.
Galerie Rémi Frémiot
5, rue du Lycée
06000 Nice
Olivier Briand exhibition until January 31, 2007.
