Romain Best — Coulissements par frictions — Frac île-de-france, le Plateau — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: November 9, 2023 → January 7, 2024

The Project Room is the Frac’s new prospective and experimental space, located in the last room of the Plateau. It offers the opportunity to present research, diploma, grant and residency projects to French and foreign artists, preferably from the Île de France region. This reactive and flexible programming is also built in dialogue with the essential structures supporting creation, and particularly young creation, but also art schools and universities in the Paris region or internationally.

Romain Best was born in Lyon in 1995. He lives in Le Pré-Saint-Gervais and works in Romainville.

Romain Best’s installation and sculpture work is rooted in materials as diverse as rainwater, steel, grease, bronze, aluminum, copper, plastic, rubber, steel, lead and ceramics. Learning the techniques involved in apprehending the different states of matter is the starting point for research that leads to new experimentation. In this virtuous circle of investigation, Romain Best becomes a blacksmith, an alchemist, a dowser or a researcher, acquiring skills as his interests are shaped by contingent necessities.

Chance and serendipity are central to his practice, which reinvents itself as it experiments. The place of work and the reuse of materials play an important role. The resources at hand open the door to processes that enable the invention of tools and the creation of new spatial modalities for objects and the spaces they occupy. Romain Best is a dogged explorer of the living forms of transition between different states of matter, most often creating minimalist sculptures using the casting technique (ceramic or bronze). The reproducibility induced by casting enables him to create variations that reveal the serial production process by which his sculptures come to life.

Curator : Maëlle Dault