Romain Tallet is a Brussels based artist, who, after five years of painting courses, quickly wound up with narratives, that now, appears through different media, movies and photographs, songs and performances, collages and installations. Among them, text stands as the link for all, and multi-media works seems to be a spacial extension of his writings.
In the heterogeneity of his artistic practice, he tends to offer several lectures, one instantly operating on a surface meaning, and the second, which often disrupt the first, question it, and renders it trivial or parodic, as in a satiric approach.
Sens comes after the fact, and misreadings of the viewer are taken into account as he is very interested in conventions. Humour also occurs, mostly by the effect of decontextualisation, or exaggeration.
In this strategy of reappropriation, main popular culture forms like hip-hop, reality TV, as well as much lower and almost invisible forms such as French anarchist activity groups, rave party culture, art trends, pagan rituals are mixed up under a common narrative. A common plot, which, by an elaboration of a network of allusions and symmetries, tries to picture a more global whole, a «Zeitgeist».
In that recycling strategy, he chooses his material by recapturing elements that are linked to his own biography, symbols of his local youth culture, but also social conflicts and more shared issues.
The famous art forms like Hip Hop for exemple are not used in the purpose of glorification, or personal taste, but to set up and play with the common language they offers. Like found materials for a sculpture, he tries to deconstruct them, to distort and sometimes to reveal their Ideology.
In that process he is willing to give them back their social function, the original cathartic or carnavalesque effect they carry, which often, have been erased or commercially hijacked.
It is then, in this cosmology, that lies his artistic motivation, where he plays the role of a funny and amateur cultural anthropologist.
Contact: tallet.romain@gmail.com