Criticisms

“There is no past or future in art. Art which isn’t present will never be” Pablo Picasso.

If art can cross time, styles, influences and other currents, it is nonetheless in perpetual mutation. It reflects the evolution of techniques, materials, technologies. Art is inspired by society and its contemporaries. It is timeless but fits in its time and leaves its mark on it by its influences, trends and declensions.

The advent of cybernetics has been a well-known social marker since the end of the twentieth century. Technological objects have taken a prominent place in our lives, sometimes even replacing man and creating in him new desires and possibilities by making possible today the impossible of yesterday. And tomorrow ?

The artwork “Nikon” is the one that impressed me the most. This impressive totem is an assembly of silver cameras now collectors and testifies to the technological breakthrough that marked the advent of digital. This work symbolizes the cybertrash by its raw size, the cameras are assembled in their entirety to form a harmonious mass. Passionate about pictures, this timeless work represents in my opinion a photograph of the evolution of cameras.

The wall sculpture called “Roadrunner” also caught my eye because it shows another side of Cybertrash. Square-shaped with golden tones reminiscent of classical works, it is divided into distinct levels intertwined with each other in a resolutely modern style. The contrast is striking between the meticulous structural articulation of the work and the aesthetic restitution performed by a combination of multiple components (capacitors, resistors, etc.) from different electronic parts.

Rémy Tassou is currently exhibiting a selection of his strikingly original works in Switzerland for the first time, and, rather appropriately, he has gone straight to the top, for this exposition is at no other than the prestigious Suvretta House Hotel in St Moritz at 6,043 above sea level.

On one other occasion a decade ago on the same premises, the German watchmaker Glashütte exhibited a selection of its time pieces and on view was a blown-up version of the workings of one of its products in all its mechanical glory.

Through its size it was quite impractical, but there was great beauty in its asymmetrical functionality.

It seems Tassou, too, knows what appeals the Swiss psyche, namely orderliness, precision, technology. For his works are functionless, too, yet they all appear as if they have been removed from some highly sophisticated piece of high-tech hardware. More than this, they exude a form of beauty alien to the natural world, but beautiful nevertheless.

Telephony-based wall sculpture and motherboards,
129 x 123 x 17 cm, 42 kg.

The object manufactured in art has its tradition: Pablo Picasso invents collage in 1912, Marcel Duchamp creates his first ready-made in 1913. Other artists choose used objects: Kurt Schwitters collects old paper, Pierre Buraglio works with window frames and Arman raises bins to the rank of works when Jean Tinguely recovers old wheels. Today, the technological object is outdated and doomed before being worn out.

The artist Rémy Tassou disembowels him and composes accumulations with his guts: he draws a protean work with abstract and ornamental motifs where sculptures, columns and wall reliefs intersect. With cybertrash art, Rémy Tassou gives birth to the new icons of a civilization that reveres its technology.

Rémy Tassou. Cybertrash sculptor.

Rémy Tassou dissects the guts of computer machines. In his workshop Grasse, electrical and electronic components metamorphose into sculptures and totems.

All day long, Rémy Tassou juggles balance sheets and income statements. But it’s the evening he comes to his true passion: electronic components. “Electronics was born in 1945, and I, ten years later, the appearance of these materials coincides with my presence on this planet,” he says, convinced that the invention of electronics is as important than the discovery of fire. Fascinated by these colorful and aesthetic materials, he dismantles with curiosity electrical and electronic objects and exhibits his findings. When invited to dinner, he enjoys replacing the traditional bottle of wine with a bottle filled with memory sticks. “Such a bottle has a computing power superior to any computer!”, He jokes. The apprentice artist notices that his friends keep his presents. Better: they highlight them in their living room.

Contemporary art, when Rémy Tassou recycles.

In the hands of Rémy Tassou, recycled objects become the basis of sober and eloquent works of art.

For three years, Rémy Tassou tried to convince radio listeners that ” there is no more beautiful collection than a collection of contemporary art “. Taking up Dubuffet’s reflection, according to which ” art must arise where we do not expect it “, the cybertrash artist, installed place de la Poissonnerie, exhibits his sculptures permanently in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Art Seiller gallery, but also, lately in a place to say the least unusual: the glass roof of the Center Leclerc. ” Contemporary art has its place in this type of structure !” And these eight sculptures, including two more than 200 kilos, were appreciated by the public and the clientele, whether you are an art lover or not … or sensitized to waste management.

From the laptop to the work.

Thus, the Syndicat Intercommunal of Valorization of the Waste of the zone Cannes / Grasse, had appealed to him. “I  find that organizing a collection of small electronic and electrical equipment is a clever move. This waste is an environmental problem.  Incinerated with household waste, they are dangerous. But become harmless from the moment when sorted, they are recycled by industrial”.

Crazy

Tassou. The exoplanet.

His sculptures, assembling electronic components and musical material, bear witness to our times. Astonishing.
Wondering what to do with your 8o transistor? No more worries: Tassou recycles, Tassou transforms, and beautifully! He is the only one in the world to practice what he has now called for fourteen years the “Cybertrash”. These totems or wall sculptures are made only with electronic components. The choice of this material is for Tassou a certain universality: it is found in the four corners of the world, in the belly of very different objects. Their viability is restricted.

Composing a work from cathode-ray tubes will quickly become a challenge for this artist who works the series! He goes through the dump sites, the manufacturers and also relies on donations. His studio is full of tiny pieces from all over, arranged by color, tone and type in small jars. Tassou spends hours there, a meticulous and passionate work for this Parisian, who has been posing for five years his memory cards and other arms of record players in Grasse.

Tassou sculpteur cybertrash

Magic because complex, today’s electronics is however perfectible. So perfectible that, says Tassou, she will be invisible tomorrow. Therefore, all the work of memory is to be done during this period of visibility “hyper brief” in the history of Humanity, since it extends only from 1945 to 2050. The “Cybertrash” of Tassou is therefore to use the scraps of cybernetics to bring them to life in other ways.

It is in Grasse that for three years, Tassou, native of Nantes, realizes his works, celebrating the real beauty of electronic components that will emerge in space in the form of wall sculptures or, in three dimensions, totems. “Unique sculptures and totems that record the memory of obsolete technology from the very beginning”.

“The cybernetics antique dealer”

Remy Tassou exhibited his work at the Salle Saint Esprit in Valbonne last June. Caught up in a unique adventure since 1988, this 45-year-old from Nantes, now settled in Paris, has paved a new way in contemporary art. A science fanatic and former businessman, be is the founding father of ‘Cybertrash’, the ostensible purpose of which is the glorification of computer waste. Sophia Antipolis, the NICT Science Park, is therefore the obvious place to display his artistic work.

So here we are at the heart of the electronic chip, on a voyage of discovery into microprocessors that have been catalogued, analysed and classified before becoming works of art, wall paintings or totems. Wall sculptures of such significant weight (“Driver” weighs in at 10 kg) clearly represent much more than a simple assembly of salvaged parts.

Well before him, Cesar. Annan and Ben had engaged in the art of amassing, piling and crushing. But Tassou strives, above all. for aesthetic quality. He loves beauty, and that is what attracts the eye to these strange assemblies: the harmony of his colours and shapes could leave une thinking they had been created solely to be part of the final tableau.

Rémy Tassou, artist “cybertrash”

During the day, Rémy Tassou, 44, works in finance. But at night, he wanders the streets of Paris in search of corpses of microcomputers or electronic devices abandoned on the sidewalk. The machines that work do not interest him: “I prefer to look at them when they have given up the soul, to strip them, feed me from their bowels and free them from their cybernetic coping”. Clearly, this artist “cybertrash” recovers thousands of components and connects them to each other to compose wall sculptures and colorful totems. “I’m ecstatic about their inner beauty, because some components graze goldsmith”. We understand better why the artist secretly dreams of being able to someday “trasher” a satellite or military electronic equipment for which gold and platinum are frequently used.

Rémy Tassou, cyber-artist

Rémy Tassou has provoked the intrusion of the imaginary into the universe of components of the microcomputer, telephony or electronics, which allows to release the classic structures of their assembly.
At first, it is for the artist to disassemble industrial machines, in order to extract the substantive marrow: their components. The artistic approach is extended in the unification, the link by a plastic relationship of these components in wall sculptures or totems. IBM 4869, Input, Laser, Rack, Dolby, Sodium or Luminescence are the result of this work. These works are elaborated in glass volumes filled with components whose classification is established by natures and by colors. The materials concerned by the “cybertrash” are surrounded, the limit between what is cybertrash and what is not being extremely palpable.

The progress in the compilation of data, thanks to the miniaturization of transistors, a major feature of this whole discipline focused on efficiency, should yet stop, we are told, around 2010. We would have exhausted the possibilities offered by the knowledge of modern physics, in the field of technological applications, far from the start, in 1948, of the “machine-baby”, this gigantic set of 12 consoles filling an entire room and for the operation of which the least adventurous insect was a danger.
Between the two so little time has passed … But a revolution has taken place thanks to a considerable change in the conservation of data and the transmission of information. The “Galaxy Gutenberg” has probably given way to the “Marconi Galaxy” since we perceive our global environment daily as a “global village”, as predicted by Marshall Mc Luhan. This perception, however, hardly reaches reality beyond the surface of the images. It is more radically that the transformation operates, deciding more resolutely our relationship to the world.

Cybernetics governs things and beings, as well as the Greek etymology, “kubernêtike”, reminds us. This science of regulatory mechanisms, servomechanisms, this science relating to communications, to their regulation, has generated powerful machines whose extraordinary efficiency and gigantic capacities have appropriated space by defining a time of their own.

In this frame that the circulation of coded information constructs, in this crossed dialogue of computers, this impalpable fabric of the computer network, a cosmography takes shape with unknown contours, with improbable reliefs, as difficult to grasp as it has been in the eyes or to the very consciousness of the man of the Renaissance the planisphere which is now familiar to us. The concrete reality, the one that is experienced daily, that is awkwardly explored as uncertain experiences and tried-and-tested knowledge, seems to fade in favor of the virtual construction imposed by cybernetic tools become almost autonomous. The environment of each is no longer measured by the senses, it is produced, as an object, by a technology whose control, if not the use, is inaccessible to most …
Yet, if all this is true, it is also too simple; cybernetics announces neither the end of time nor the end of history; it forces us to rethink what we are, to redistribute tasks and knowledge, to rethink speed and communication, but it also makes it possible to discern invisible vanishing lines before it. Given the worst of it, the immediate control of the activities and displacements of each one, that it makes possible or probable, playful forms of its appropriation appear, very different from the games programmed for the consumption of which is summarized more often the use of family computers.

In itself the collection thus constituted, infinite, as much as manic, could display an aesthetic principle, in the reappropriation of an electronics passed beyond the system, inactive, crumbled … The collection is composition, poetically, reaffirming the pre-eminence of the living by the elementary gesture, which repeats, undoes, classifies and assembles series that no longer respond to the cybernetic necessities but to the joyful ones that Tassou invents in an operation that is accomplished thanks to the multiple beauty of the components, the unpredictable diversity of industrial and geographical origins.

To collect as patiently what, scattered, neglected, should have disappeared, is to proceed to an archery with indecisive limits. Every week, Tassou finds new components with shapes, colors, unexpected materials … Yet this memory of computer science and information mechanisms is probably worth less by the archeology it announces than by the aesthetic jubilation that can to accompany.

Each of these objects, tiny or massive, isolated from the ensemble to which it seemed to belong only, is revealed to itself; shape decided by a now forgotten function in favor of the possible seduction of the look that the colors will stimulate …

Decided by the chance of discoveries, carried by “creative intuition”, never any piece is the result of a preliminary tactical calculation, the outcome of a thoughtful plan. Tassou has the habit of distinguishing the creative and the artist, the first developing all the possible solutions, the second always making the right choice … It is about manifesting an invention, in the double meaning of the word, the time elaborating something new and revealing what, buried, remained unnoticed. In this world reconstructed by cybernetics, Tassou hears, little by little, modestly in each of his works, to give shape, irony and fascination mixed, to the relationship that man has with his products … Obviously, working with the waste what claims to cancel duration for the benefit of immediacy is to work on time; so much so that Tassou simply defines his activity as “a hobby that avoids boredom” … Yet he also speaks of “working quickly by not doing the same thing twice, avoiding unnecessary things”. It is true that his pieces show an art in the old sense, combining the concerns of the artist and the care of the craftsman.

Therefore, one can understand that Tassou observes with lucidity, without distrust and without illusions, a market where, he says, “the contemporary art does not sell but is bought, confidentially” …