HAINS Raymond (1926-2005) - Lot 94

HAINS Raymond (1926-2005) Untitled (Lombards) Torn poster Signed and dated 1974 lower right Subject size: 23 x 81 cm - Frame size: 34 x 96 cm Framed piece Provenance : private collection Note: Raymond Hains was in person that passage between life and art that everyone always talks about, but which he authentically embodied. Raymond's life was exemplary. With the presence of art in his life, art as a life strategy, he showed that the fields of the word and the image, as well as previous and contemporary works of art, were his privileged field of investigation. It is here that Hains reminds us that art is in itself a subversion of codes, and that what should interest us first and foremost is our own way of living. Throughout his various periods, Hains demonstrated unfailing inventiveness, all of which were highly poetic. Hains was also a magician, in the sense that Dalí, Burroughs and Brion Gysin spoke of art as magic. On the one hand, fixing ideas, determining anchor points, determining a topography. On the other, the question of optics, image and color, which we would be wrong to ignore in a work like Raymond Hains'. The colors printed on the posters feature tones absent from the painters' palette. "There are some extremely bizarre combinations of circumstances. That's why I became a moustachist structuralist, a dialectician of truisms." Raymond Hains In his own way, Raymond Hains is an exhibition (in every sense of the word) of contemporary poetic life, a drift through the maze of words, images and shifts in meaning. Under a playful, humorous guise, Hains creates a system that enchants, amuses and challenges, somewhere between situationist drift and free association, where everything seems to emerge as if from a dream, a hypnagogy, yet everything is true. In this sense, Hains is always or again a New Realist, generating a new reality, a unique artist who gives a different view of reality, his own, while suggesting that such a path exists in each of us, that each of us is called to live, reinterpret and reinvent our lives. Marc Dachy, Langue de cheval et facteur temps, Actes Sud, 1998