Gabriel Lemaire Sicre
Gabriel Lemaire Sicre spent some twenty years in computing before devoting his life to colour. He paints, he assembles, he plays the piano. Since 2013, in a former leather factory in Graulhet, in the Tarn, he has been building a body of work with no equivalent anywhere, Le Paradis des Machines, the Paradise of Machines: scrapped industrial machines, dismantled, cleaned, painted, and returned to a second life in which they no longer serve, they signify.
An artist before the machines
He was born into a family of entrepreneurs. His parents ran a company of some fifty people near Paris. Two of his great-grandparents were painters, one uncle kept a gallery in Paris, another was an inventor and a prizewinner of the Concours Lepine. At home, one lived with paintings on the walls, and there was nothing exceptional about it. He finished his studies at nineteen, too early, he says, to have received any deep teaching, and he trained himself alone, buying art books, without ever taking a drawing class.
Computing, a passion and then a limit
In the early 1980s he chose a profession that promised to change the world. He designed databases, listening directly to their users, and found real pleasure in solving their problems. He practised it for some twenty years, then left it behind. Freeing people from tedious tasks was a noble quest, he observes, but infantilising users and the endless race for technological progress were not. He had nothing new left to offer in that field.
Colour, on impulse
His encounter with painting grew out of the wish to move beyond a world whose limits he was living. It began with paint projected onto large sheets of plywood, which revealed, as he writes, genuine paintings. Alongside this he worked on mosaics. He describes himself, in fact, as a mosaic personality, a non-linear mind, with sharp, tart colours and clearly cut outlines. He plays the piano, essentially Bach, in whom he sees a source of endless teaching, and he likes to point out that a score is only a programme to be interpreted: « My paintings are really nothing but a game in which I interpret, adding the dimension of colour. » From this period come the paintings his catalogue presents today, The Feast, The Fire-Breathing Dragon, Globe, King, along with the large cut panels of the final chapter.
August 2013, Graulhet
He decided to leave the Paris suburbs, searched online for a large building in the south of France, and arrived in the Tarn. What he found was a factory from 1955 in need of renovation, entirely empty, without a single machine inside. Between the end of its industrial life and his arrival, it had served as a second-hand depot for thirty years.
The town explains the work
Graulhet was once one of the world capitals of leather. It had built its reputation on tawing, the making of leather from small hides, and its growth continued into the early 1970s. Then the crisis of 1973, together with other factors, set off the decline of what was almost a single-industry town, one that survives today only for the luxury trade. It is one of the few towns in France where you can still feel what early twentieth century industrial town planning was, with factories and homes interlocked, the owner’s house behind the workshop, separated by a courtyard. « There is an intelligence of towns that allows certain things to happen there and nowhere else », he writes. Out of that decline came his material: the machines were there, in numbers and abandoned, on the derelict sites and in the stores of the engineering workshops.
The first piece was a twenty-tonne press
He came across it while wandering, in the car park of an engineering workshop, and describes it as the most imposing Pac-Man he had ever seen. The owner looked at him with wide eyes: « Do you really want it? » The deal was done. The machine had escaped the scrap dealer because the weight of the metal did not cover the cost of hauling it to the foundry. Finding it rather lonely, he provided it with company. An unheard-of and unsuspected seam had opened, and a coherent collection took shape, one he knows could never be assembled again.
The method, long and painstaking
First the grease has to come off, with a small kitchen knife, washing-up liquid and a scouring pad. « To reach the moment of grace, you have to go through the moment of grease. » The machines most often arrive straight at their final position, and the whole painting job is done there, with several coats of primer. The colours are all as they come, straight from the tin, chosen so that the work can be restored should it fade. Some pieces weigh several tonnes, and colour gives them a lightness that makes their mass almost disappear.
A sign, in 2018
He discovered that the logo of the Manufacture tarnaise des Vetements de Cuir, which occupied these walls before him, resembled the pictorial handwriting he had developed years earlier. « I understood that I was in my rightful place, and that perhaps we are guided. »
His influences, he claims them openly
The masters of modern art first, Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Fernand Leger, who had painted the machines of their own century while those machines were still turning. He extends their work by starting from the machines themselves, once they have been scrapped. « One is always born of someone. » Then the history of art, quoted without detour, with a tribute to Ingres for Angelica Saved by Roger, a Greek Kore, a Venus Without Arms, a Thinker of Graulhet, and a whole Egyptian pantheon. And finally Andre Malraux, whose Les Voix du Silence left a lasting mark on him, and whom he quotes everywhere: « Art is the shortest path from man to man. »
Five possible readings, which he proposes himself: play, transmission, the museum, the metamorphosis of the Jovian world, that of power, into the jovial world, that of frank good humour, and finally quintessence. « Man is truly himself only when he plays », he recalls, after Carl Gustav Jung, and many retired workers have told him, with humour, that if the machines had been painted this way in their day, they would have worked on them with more pleasure.
Today
Le Paradis des Machines occupies the former Breilhac factory, at 54 avenue Victor Hugo in Graulhet, a building raised in the confidence of the postwar boom years, when things were built to last. The place is open to visitors and welcomes groups. Gabriel Lemaire Sicre still works there, wearing, as he puts it, an accountant’s shirt and a pair of jeans covered in paint. He sums up what brought him this far in these words: « I have made up my mind that it is beauty that will save the World. »
Going further
The Journal devotes several articles to his work: the story of a man, how he came to painting, what he is after with the machines, how an abandoned machine becomes a work, a glossary of tannery machines and the industrial history of Graulhet.
Seeing and acquiring his works
The available pieces are presented one by one in the catalogue, with their dimensions, their materials and a written note. The price is displayed, set with the artist, the same for everyone. If this is your first acquisition, the guide to buying a contemporary sculpture answers the questions in order. For anything specific, the contact page is the right place.