Three or four times a year, the Centre Pompidou-Metz will give carte blanche to an artist to come up against the constraints of the wallpaper technique (seriality, limited chroma) and to create customised wallpaper for this space. This series of commissions provides a space for the expression of current production and emerges from the desire to make the new Centre in Metz a place for living art and a platform for exchange.
Jean-Christophe Massinon will open the proceedings with work deliberately anchored in the Lorrain territory. Far from any nostalgia or sociocritical statement, his Salle des pendus [Room of the Hanged] evokes the history of mining in a tender, gracious and light way, like a reverence. Playing on depth of field and the height of the ceilings, his work almost completely covers this space, reinterpreting the symbol of a particular time in history within this new cultural venue. Chains, hooks and baskets from the historical changing rooms in the mines are used here as serial motifs, monumentalized to abstraction.
