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Argument

We owe so much to machines.   They are everywhere in our lives.   Thanks to them and energy, we can do anything.Thanks to them, man became Superman.

The Paradise of Machines, like the Paradise of Humans, is a place where the valiants, the deserving, the exemplary are placed so that they can live a new life out of oblivion and enlighten the living being for them a source of inspiration.  Muses.  Paradise is a museum or resident of muses machines.

Industrial era

​When we look at the industrial era, we can only think of people working on these noisy, unsafe, and completely alienating to body and mind machines..    As in all times, it was hard, and people fought for these conditions to change.
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History speaks of great men, less often of the linchpin without which they could not have accomplished anything; and even less of machines, without which nothing great could have been achieved.  They must be honoured. 

Chaos

​Graulhet was an industrial capital of leather until a massive deindustrialization at the end of the 20th century.   This deindustrialization left many factories abandoned and led to a descent into hell, Chaos, the original void.

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the old world is dying, the new world is slow to appear and in this dark light monsters appear.

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Antonio Gramsci

The deindustrialization emptied the factories of their machines which went either to scrap metal or abroad. When I arrived in Graulhet in 2013, there and there remained old abandoned machines, and the first I discovered was a press, a real monster of 20 tons whose beauty immediately captivated me.

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Everything was here and there, in wasteland, in inconceivable abandoned places, inconceivable known only by scrap dealers and explorers in search of photos because there is an aesthetic of desolation...

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I made magnificent discoveries during these urbex sessions, like this stack of rotten leathers

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Other machines remained outside

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I became passionate about these machines

The uninitiated that I am, not knowing what they were for, however, immediately understood that they were created by intelligent people who mastered their business.

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As an artist, I knew the works of my predecessors such as Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Fernand Leger, Kupka and many others who painted these machines in the 20th century, such as this painting by Robert Delaunay’s Rhythm Painted in 1912.

At the same time, Marcel Duchamp introduced Ready Made into the art world.  Once out of service it seemed obvious to me to combine paint and ready made to give flavor to our desire to know about these machines.

Memory and imagination are both a negation of time, said Vladimir Nobokov,  
Thus the machines entered their dimension of eternity in the Paradise of Machines.  It is their Pantheon, their Olympus, the place where they are immediately placed in the state of divinities outside the norms of appearance and functioning.  They are at their highest level in their hierarchy, in accordance with the principle of Peter where one rises to his level of incompetence,   In the Paradise of machines they serve no purpose, except to inspire us, to go further than their simple materiality.

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