Maison Commune
Rue d'Alsace
35420 Louvigné-du-Désert

As part of Rémi Duprat's territorial residency in the commune of Louvigné-du-Désert, carried by 40mcube

Exhibition presented as part of Outsite programming

The commune of Louvigné-du-Désert has set up with the collaboration of 40mcube a residency to enable artists to develop their work and produce works, with the possibility of working with granite, a material extracted from this territory.

Rémi Duprat, the first artist to benefit from this residency, is interested in cultural practices – habits, customs, techniques – from various horizons and eras, between which he creates connections. These links take shape in his installations, through the cohabitation of documentary or staged photographs, drawings and sculptures. Know-how and technique, central to his work, allow him to reproduce and confront objects, both ancestral and contemporary, handcrafted and industrial.

The exhibition Catalina Pools is the fruit of his residency, during which he experimented with granite. The exhibition plays on a series of references that the artist interweaves. Louvigné-du-Désert and Catalina Pools, the name of an American company that manufactures and designs concrete pools and luxury gardens.

The granite objects made by Rémi Duprat are in line with the slogan of this company: “Your Oasis is Waiting” also put in parallel with Michel Tournier's book, Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique. Also, two visions of the oasis, the island and exoticism confront each other. In Michel Tournier's book the stay on the island is forced, the character regrets Western civilization and then ends up questioning it to the point of denying it. The slogan and communication of the company Catalina Pools Building recreates the myth of the earthly paradise from scratch. The artist takes again clichés of this exoticism by reproducing in granite palm trees, coconuts, cocktails, golf game, which he paints. The particularly fine treatment of the granite and its covering of colours transforms the material, giving these objects a lightness while reviving the original polychromy of sculpture in Brittany.