Walk more to produce more.
Walk to go somewhere. Walk fast not to be late, not to waste time. Walk through the noises of the city. Walk not to stand still.
I imagine creative protocols in which my body in motion becomes the engine of a production system.
I wonder about the notions of productivity and profitability, which lie at the heart of our civilization and set the pace of our everyday life. It is the more and more blurred borderline between work and private life that I question.
Through gesture repetition and self-imposed constraints, I set up reality capture systems, absurd by the very nature of their purpose, attempting to retain and represent what can only be elusive and impossible to grasp.
Côme Lequin
A hand follows the slightest contours of the city.
Day after day, the repetition of gestures seems to seek the exhaustion of the body.
Protocols give meaning to moments stolen from reality.
Heir to conceptual practices as adopted by On Kawara, Stanley Brown or, closer to us, Tim Knowles, Côme Lequin imagines rituals in which collection, performance, and drawing intersect. He belongs to that lineage of walking artists such as Francis Alÿs or Jean-Christophe Norman.
Côme Lequin creates elements halfway between prosthesis and tool, enabling his wanderings to generate new forms. Along the course of urban escapes, lines overlap and are lost. Day after day the pages accumulate and become patterns that invade the exhibition space.
In his performances, one strongly feels the importance of textual fragments gathered from the city’s inhabitants. In turn these traces go on to nourish the artist’s work. At the crossroads between the figure of the poet and that of the surveyor, Côme Lequin reveals, in a threadlike manner, the meanderings of cities, the people who inhabit them and the topologies that sustain them.
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Christophe Veys
Museum Director / Centre de la Gravure et de l’Image imprimée, La Louvière (BE)
Côme Lequin (Vannes, 1989) lives and works in Brussels, which he sees as a giant studio. In his practice, he sets up creative protocols that he usually tests out in the city, giving rise to works that lie somewhere between visual art and performance. The series of engravings "La Peau de l'ours/The Bear’s Skin" perfectly illustrates his experimental approach, a technique he reinvents by using only the movement of his body as a printing tool. Côme uses metal soles as printing plates for his engravings, bearing the traces of his daily journeys, notably between his home and his studio. In this way, he uses his functional commutes to create his works, questioning the relationship between art and productivity. “Walking to produce more. Walking to get somewhere. Walking fast in order not to be late,” says the artist. He also points out, “It’s this increasingly blurred boundary between the working and private life that I’m questioning.” Taking the principle even further, he has been cataloguing all his movements for several years, like a historian of the insignificant.
Côme plays with the absurdity of his protocols, in an approach that is almost surrealist, reminiscent of Marcel Broodthaers. Collected during the first lockdown, the 13 airtight containers of "Aires de Côme" belong to the same register of the absurd. The samples of air “under Covid-19” captured by the artist and his close ones are like a living archive of a period as strange as it is unsettling in our history. As with everything the artist undertakes, they respond to a thirst for subversion in a world that is controlled, trivialized, and rationalized.
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Laura Neve
Artistic Director of the Carrefour des arts foundation and art historian (BE)
