PASSION & SPORT

ARMAN

Whetting the artist’s appetite 

Arman (1928 – 2005) was a French painter, sculptor and visual artist. He is famous the world over for his Accumulations of everyday objects symbolizing industrial civilizations. After studying at the school of decorative arts in Nice and at the École du Louvre in Paris, he became one of the founding members of the New Realists movement.

 

When the Renault Collection was founded in 1967, Arman contacted the firm. He wanted to work in the factory or, as he called it, “the shop of colors”. His work focused on industry and its operation. He liked the idea of testing his production-consumption-destruction triptych on industrial objects. “They whet my appetite by showing me how the parts were produced and prepared before being assembled in the plant.”

Accumulations 

Arman produced three main categories of work under the auspices of Renault’s Research, Art and Industry department. In the first, the parts selected by Arman are carefully laid out to give the work its shape. Accumulation Renault No. 114, made up of fan blades, is symbolic in this respect.

 

Accumulation No. 115, in which examples of the Renault logo are superposed in seeming chaos, belongs to the second category of works.  These random Accumulations do away with normal spatial references to establish their own unpredictable and  disconcerting standards.

 

The third group of works is the most spectacular. Made up of accumulations of vehicle body parts, these works are almost sculptures – and, as reflected in Accumulation Renault No. 152, truly colossal.

Shared interests 

The fruitful cooperation between the artist and the manufacturer would – literally – be set in stone. Two six-meter wide walls of accumulations were included in the architectural design of Renault’s head office in early 1974. Made up of sawn-off cylinder heads placed next to each other against a black background, these two works are astonishingly vital and harmonious.

 

All these works reflect the depth of the shared interests between Arman and Renault. The artist’s Accumulations recycle the manufacturer’s output with a critical eye. With, as a backdrop, an analysis of the loss of identity linked to mass production. “My detailed tour of the plants, which was more than a tour in fact, since I actually lived there for a short while, convinced me of the need for a form of modern existence,” concluded Arman.