Maxime Drouet

Constantly searching for railway relics, Maxime Drouet provides tangible evidence of graffiti heritage. It is much more than just paint, and train depots become cathedrals. An insatiable wanderer, overwhelmed by the force of his own impulses, Maxime is brutally caught up in legal troubles. In 2011, his favorite medium disappears along with his freedom to paint, and he must now survive his passion. Forced to refocus his practice, the discovery of a cemetery of abandoned trains became for him the scene of a resurrection, the arena of his revenge, the court of his creative impulses. Discreetly, Maxime painted panels in his own style, naive, scripted, and cynical. For hours on end, under the open sky, he works on this raw material, pouring his emotions and moods into it, undeterred by the large number of train cars to paint, photograph, and then dismantle. But it would be impossible for him to stop there. The next step, more crucial than cruel, is to bite into the flesh of these trains. By removing the windows, painted on all sides, one by one, Maxime is creating unique graffiti relics, but that's not all: objects from a bygone railway heritage, the various stickers with safety messages are preserved as they are, as endearing for their outdated graphics as they are insignificant. Touched by the smallest detail, even the dates conscientiously engraved, they capture his full attention and admiration. Driven by perseverance, Maxime takes with him fragments of memories, the revelation of secrets blown away by spray paint, the harshness of an act as heavy in meaning as it is in weight. Arguing for a more sympathetic view of graffiti, the common thread running through Maxime Drouet's work is the simple fact of the walls of these trains, a materialization of the duality that drives him: the ambiguity of the ephemeral nature of the act versus the permanence of the medium, the illegal aspect versus a presence in a gallery, of an art form that is omnipresent in the world and yet so confidential, not to mention the relationship between light and darkness. And while everything is a matter of perspective, the work remains nonetheless everything: frontal and whole on one side (on the outside), suggested and partial (on the inside). A new kind of stained glass, they teach us about the unpredictability of artistic forms in our contemporary societies. In any case, Maxime Drouet delivers a most sincere intention, offering an immersion into the very secret lair of the most sacred of graffiti media. Sabella Augusto