A leather-trade machine weighing two tonnes does not arrive on a plinth by magic. Between the moment Gabriel Lemaire Sicre spots it in a derelict yard and the moment it is painted, there is work nobody ever talks about, and it takes months.
1. Finding
The starting point is not a studio, it is a piece of ground. A derelict site, the yard of an engineering workshop, a car park. The machines that survived survived by accident: the weight of the metal did not cover the cost of hauling it to the foundry. They escaped the scrap dealer for a purely accounting reason.
That is worth keeping in mind in front of any piece in the catalogue. Each of these machines came within a few euros of disappearing.
2. Deciding, without knowing
At this stage the machine is covered in grease, rust and vegetation. It is sometimes lying down, sometimes wedged in. Deciding to take it means deciding on a guessed silhouette, without knowing what is underneath, or whether the piece can be dismantled at all.
3. Moving it
This is the most physical and the most expensive stage. A truck, a crane, straps. A machine is rarely loaded upright, and it often has to be righted on site before it can be lifted. None of this is reversible: a badly handled part bends, and a bent machine does not straighten.
4. Dismantling
Once it arrives, the machine is taken apart. This is the stage that separates the work radically from simply moving an object. To dismantle is to understand: to discover how the hide passed between the rollers, where the blade sat, how the drive arrived from the line shaft.
That knowledge is lost everywhere else. The workers who used these machines did not write manuals, and the manufacturers’ documentation vanished with the factories.
5. Degreasing
This is the longest stage, and the least spectacular. A hundred years of mineral grease, hide dust and tannin, to be removed part by part. The work is done with a small kitchen knife, literally.
The artist has made a phrase of it that sums up the whole practice: to reach the moment of grace you have to go through the moment of grease.
6. Priming, then painting
Then comes colour. A primer, then colours straight from the tin, unmixed. That technical choice is not aesthetic, it is a matter of conservation: an unmixed colour can be matched exactly again. If the piece fades in twenty years, it can be restored. A mixed colour is never remade the same way twice.
And there is the effect, which is the real subject: several of these pieces weigh tonnes, and the colour takes their mass away. A machine that once crushed a workshop becomes light.
What this changes for a visitor
Knowing all this changes what you look at. A painted machine is not a found object set on a plinth. It is a machine that was found, hoisted, dismantled, understood, cleaned for weeks, reassembled, primed and painted.
The complete catalogue holds 163 works in thirteen chapters. None is for sale: Le Paradis des Machines is a collection, and the place can be visited. To find out what each of these machines did, a glossary of the leather trade is published separately. To arrange a visit, contact is direct.