Raymond Hains

The trend known as ‘Nouveau Réalisme’ used poetic description of the world as one of its most effective tools for deconstruction. Along those lines, the work of Hains, the inventor of the hipnagogoscope, can be understood as a recombination of that reality as opposed to a simple appropriation of it. Objects taken from the street are small, sudden bits of reality, as Hains himself says of his fences and walls covered with scratched posters. Because of that, Hains considers himself as more of an inventor than as an artist. His references to language, the nature of words, literature, and to historiography as memory, make evident a created and technical principle associated to reminiscence. The catalogue has compiled works from 1949 to the present, as well as some of Hain’s own documents (letters, invitations to exhibitions, articles in press, etc.) and those of author such as Breton, Bryen, Villeglé, and Dufrêne, among others.