Raymond Hains. You Know Nothing Raymond

About

Raymond Hains became known in the late 1940s working with torn posters and board fences found on the street. Since the beginning of his career, the artist was close to and often associated with Nouveau Réalisme. Nevertheless Hains' work remained unclassifiable; often playing with verbal and visual associations, referring to history while looking way ahead to the future. In this way, Raymond Hains’ work maintained its contemporary relevance for decades. 

The exhibition You know nothing Raymond is a view on Raymond Hains' work by Jérémy Demester, a young French artist. It is a homage from one artist to another, a conversation between the two artists, a dialogue between artworks that span over half a century. Demester chose Hains’ works with a painter's sensibility rather than through a curator's eye. It is a tribute paid to the achieved oeuvre. The title of the exhibition, chosen by Demester, refers to the world of old philosophers, in which admitting that one knows nothing was a sign of the highest virtue. 

Raymond Hains looked in the streets for torn posters, for the somehow damaged, distorted information. For him, the artworks have been there before he came along, without being noticed by anybody. Demester responds by taking the whole process into his own hands. He creates a painting and then disrupts the information it carries with a high-pressure cleaner, a method that results in the creation of a similar visual experience to that of the torn posters.
Hains' deeply rooted interest for the world to be seen in an abstracted or distorted manner which fundamentally defines his visual experimentations, can be traced in the exhibition in several works (in the torn posters as well as the distorted images). The artist’s favourite metaphor of an artwork as an ongoing construction site, materialised in his board fences, is represented by one of his more recent works from this series, a fence made of skis. 
Constantly imagining new forms and media during his career, Raymond Hains’ oeuvre always stimulates the viewer’s eyes, experience, memory and imagination.