Maxime Lamarche

“Maxime Lamarche applies manual and DIY intelligence to the most spectacular aspect of entertainment: cinema, and the objects that it depicts and raises to the rank of mythical objects. Among these, the car, which the artist, before Firebird, had already worked on with Midnightswim (2012), which consisted in (half) a Ford floating in a pool of the Jardin des Plantes on the occasion of the event Voyage à Nantes. It represents a kind of wreck of the automotive industry, slowly going under while drawing its archetypal image from a long-lost golden age of cinema. Maxime Lamarche would use this car again in another piece: Soft Serve Boat (2013) is a hybrid, a speedboat reconstructed from the other half-body of the Ford. The piece floated (on dry dock) on the industrial past of the Durolle Valley in Thiers where it was presented in 2013, linking the proud working-class nostalgia of the Creux de l’Enfer brownfield with its future to come. Let us also mention another piece, permanently exhibited in Saint-Etienne, Sauna-Malibu (2013), which (partly) trivialises the healthy lifestyle of the West Coast. The installation consists in a fully functional sauna built in a small cedar wood cabin that mimics the architecture of Californian lifeguard huts. The stove that heats it is powered by a thundering diesel motor – again, part of the wrecked car. The view from inside the cabin overlooks the city. The piece functions as a reversal of viewpoints and of the notion of exoticism, but also serves a double purpose: in addition to acting as a sauna, it also supports the roof of the exhibition space, the Greenhouse association.”

Judicaël Lavrador, excerpt from Sous les tropismes du concept
Translated by Lucy Pons