Romain Vicari produces a series of hybrid works, mixing on-site sculptures, sounds, smells and rap clips, all of these elements composing a landscape in which fiction toys with reality, and where the sacred encounters the secular, and entertainment becomes a religion. While plunging the public into an environment between an urban and natural jungle, the show works like a flashlight, or the exploration of a mirage bringing in all of our senses.
Sculptures made of resin, expanding foam, metal, sand and tiling stand up against the concrete, brutalist architecture of the exhibition space. A flat-screen television broadcasts a video made in the workspaces of the Rues d’Aubervilliers and in the darkness of the rooms in Palais de Tokyo, in a film weaving connections between
hip-hop, an alternative culture which is now mainstream, religion and the bodily gestures sculpted by the use of social networks. A sound runs through the exhibition, the voice of a futurist priest, accompanied by the diffusion of a fragrance made up of cannabis and leather. Vicari waltzes on the borderlines between the precarious and appearances, while bringing together public spaces (streets, worksites, advertising, weeds, a bench where you sit down…) and intimate spaces (the living-room, bedroom, sofa, cut flowers, the television…). All being places that have been colonised by the techniques of mass entertainment and which are at the heart of Romain Vicari’s work.
The prix découverte des Amis du Palais de Tokyo is supported by: