Nicolas Momein
Born in 1980
Lives and works in Paris and Saint-Etienne
"With Nicolas Momein, who has considerable experience as a tapestry maker, an idea can be curled up like a foetus in a material form that repels it. Producing something like "scraps" of design (or "scrap design"), he presses charges of interminable signification, to begin with, against his already considerable output. Are these aborted projects or abortions of projects? Each object seems like a spinoff of a programmatic lapse, as if the subconscious resources allocated to subsidiary functional tasks were bent on presenting everyday things as a pile of vanities. Each is the result of a simple gesture: moulding, glueing, carding, carving, welding, layering, etc. But the gestures are swept off towards deviation, excessive precision; and instead of co-opting matter intended for the target idea, they would seem to end up in an intermediate form, a design which, as it were, is blurred and anarchic, aborted.
Now that everything in the world has become design, Momein is "fakirising" function as a magical foundation for the status of a work!" [...]
From "Form, you know", by Vincent Labaume, curator of the exhibition The tradition of disgust, at the Christophe Gaillard gallery, Paris, 2012
Translated by John Doherty, 2014.
© Adagp, Paris