Artiste plasticien
L'art de prendre le jeu au sérieux.
The art of taking play seriously.
A painter father, a seamstress mother — I grew up between brushes and fabric, and started out running from both. University, radio, a stint in a photo studio doing retouching, then building websites for artists. Images, always images — but other people's. At 27, back to square one: the Valence School of Fine Arts.
Then sixteen years as a webmaster. A man's got to eat.
Covid came, and with it, the breaking point. I started creating again. Nowhere to exhibit? I invented virtual exhibitions — with real works inside.
My work since: taking play seriously. Painting in layers like on a screen — masking tape, airbrush, overlapping patterns. Laser-cutting soft shapes. Stretching retro fabric over volumes. Making comic-book speech bubbles burst out of their frames. The digital prepares, the hand executes, and somewhere between the two, something derails — that's usually where it gets interesting.
I live and work in Montmeyran, in the Drôme, and teach adult classes at the Valence School of Fine Arts.
Visual hubbub. Words that miss their mark with perfect dignity.
See →Painting the way you work in layers.
See →A puzzle that refuses to lie flat.
See →The picture has puffed up.
See →The wallpaper becomes a stage.
See →A pop-up book left open and never closed.
See →When the machine takes the bit between its teeth.
See →Standing before a work by Rubin, you have the feeling of catching something in the act of growing. A form has settled there, organic, slightly soft, and seems to keep slowly swelling as you watch — as if the paint had its own pace, its own way of spreading and claiming territory.
These forms represent nothing and give up nothing. They are not objects, not signs, not well-behaved abstractions: they are supple presences, things that have the right to exist without having to justify themselves. They overflow the frame, nestle against old wallpaper, settle where you didn't expect them. The familiar takes fright at itself; the decorative receives a visitor that stays for dinner.
There is rigour beneath the softness. Rubin paints the way you stack layers — masking tape, airbrush, overlapping patterns, each element in its place. Then the hand intervenes and betrays the programme. The digital proposes a perfection, the hand answers with an organic skid, and it is precisely at the join between the two that things get interesting.
The misreading would be to see irony. There is none. There is childhood, in the most serious sense: you invent your own rules and hold to them fiercely. Taking play seriously. And letting the forms live their soft lives.
Rubin's works seem to belong to a family of forms that have escaped the usual classifications. Neither geometric abstraction, nor figuration, nor quite sculpture, they occupy an intermediate space where the image gradually acquires a physical presence.
This ambiguity is perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of his work. The frame ceases to be a limit and becomes a porous membrane. Forms cross planes, overlap, thicken and end up occupying real space.
They never impose themselves heroically. They infiltrate. They silently colonise wallpapers, invade old patterns, settle in the interstices of décor. They advance with the quiet obstinacy of a weed.
Rubin takes play seriously. His absurd forms are not there to mock the world; they propose other ways of inhabiting it. His works do not tell a story: they invent an ecosystem.
Watching Rubin work is like watching a computer screen bleed aerosol. The digital prepares the ground, but it is the hand — armed with masking tape, lasers and spray cans — that commits the salvatory accident. That precise moment when digital perfection derails on the roughness of the real is where the material breathes.
In the relief compositions, geometric patterns and acid gradients refuse the fatality of flatness. They pull free from the background, overlap and float in space. The Photoshop layer takes on flesh, is cut out and frozen in the physical world.
Subversion seeps in everywhere. The failed word, the comic-book speech bubble rise to the rank of proud plastic objects. The textual false note becomes an aesthetic texture, a joyful profanation cohabiting with biological waves colonising old wallpapers.
The commitment to invented rules is absolute. It is the posture of childhood: you decree that the living-room carpet is an ocean of lava and forbid anyone to touch it. The result is a rebellious, profoundly human geometry, born where screen finally meets matter.