We Are The Painters - The Resistance of the Guardians of the Museum

We Are The Painters is a duo formed by Nicolas Beaumelle and Aurélien Porte. The artists' production has been running for about ten years now and is characterized by the fact that they jealously guard their trade secret: we do not know who does what. It is in a way as if a third person was at the origin of the creation.
For them, this specificity is natural and constitutive since the beginning of their collective practice. There are therefore two individuals working together who, on the one hand, do not carry out an accounting inventory of their respective ideas and, on the other hand, very early on create alter egos in a personal mythology which experiments with the potentialities of painting. . So much so that these characters are featured in the Paint for ... video series initiated in 2007 in outdoor landscapes. Over the years, We Are The Painters has created a multitude of landscapes, characters and federated around its activity a faithful and productive artistic community (1).

For the window, We Are The Painters offers a panorama made up of overturned chairs and reveals the painted undersides of the seats. There is thus offered to the gaze a multitude of paintings until now confidential (2), a series of landscapes, signatures, portraits of women, caves, from a recurring formal vocabulary that artists work with four hands. , now almost automatically.
Utility objects par excellence, the chairs here come out of the intimacy of the workshop, the heckling of bistros or museum rooms to come and pile up in the foreground. Playing with the codes and major themes of painting, the artists use this furniture as so many dynamic touches of color in the overall composition of the landscape.
Feet in front, they are at the same time signs of revolt and generous gifts, revealing some secrets of painters, like so many easels, clandestine sketches, cropping and setting in abyss.

(1) We Are The Painters is currently working on a film Paint for Ulma addressing the two artists' favorite themes:

folklore and artefacts as tools of creation, the artist and the creative process, landscape and poetry.

A Paula Productions production, in partnership with the Festival Trust (Copenhagen, Denmark), the MACVAL (Vitry-sur-Seine), Tripode (Nantes),

in collaboration with Le Confort Moderne (Poitiers), Kunsthalle Nikolaj (Copenhagen, Denmark), Jérôme Hambers,

and with the support of the National Foundation of Graphic and Plastic Arts.

(2) The thirty or so Baumann chairs presented in the display case come from a performative installation produced for Trust ,

second edition of the Copenhagen Art Festival, contemporary art center Nikolaj Kunsthal,

from August 29 to October 25, 2015 (Sonia Dermience Commission).