Roman Cochet

Grant awarded Fall 2014

Website:

http://www.romancochet.com/

This travel grant allowed me to go to Brazil, starting with Brasilia city and ending in Boipeba, Bahia State. On the way I stopped in Rio de Janeiro, Bello Horizonte, Inhotim, Salvador and Valencia.

The Kossak Travel Grant was a great opportunity and lifetime experience. This trip enriched my artistic practice, by making me able to analyse in situ, and through documenting, filming, discovering the Brazilian art world and meeting local painters in a country the size of a continent where the biggest modernist paradigm (with architecture especially) struggles to cohabit with the most untouched places.

In my recent painting practice I create pathways between Geometry, Modernist Architecture and the relationship to the human body. I am attempting to make these different entities collide into each other and reveal a layered world where metamorphosed forms, geometry and humans are fluctuating in a domestic space. The aim is to underline the potential disappearance of the figure through its halting movements and light in a geometrical and rational space. This issue mirrors the modernist architecture that I encountered in Brasilia and made me able to articulate more relevant questions about the arrangement of human beings in the urban context.

There are two different aspects of this country that have particularly attracted my attention. One of these two entities, is the city of Brasilia and the other is the Voodoo culture of the Bahia region, called the Candomblé.
These two cultural rifts had both originated from other continents across the Atlantic, Europe and Africa, and are colliding into the country of Brazil. I think this particular encounter is deeply interesting in order to understand certain parts of our contemporary dynamics.

Moreover, I was able to encounter local contemporary painters in Rio de Janeiro, go to the Inhotim Museum of Contemporary Art in the mountain of Minas Gerais, document images for future paintings that I will produce, and discover new culture, a new continent and a new way to look at contemporary art.