Artist Sees the Beauty in Forgotten 'Junk'

+Brauer repurposes discarded industrial parts and plastic into "poetic resistance to mass consumption."

Waste360 Staff, Staff

December 17, 2018

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Paris-based artist, known as +Brauer, is a graphic designer who sees the beauty in the materials that have been discarded and often forgotten.

Over the past 20 years, he has designed numerous album covers for French and international artists and pursued his personal artistic expression through painting, photography and sculpture. He regularly exhibits in Paris and in several cities around the world. Just recently, he shared some of his work with Waste360 that is showcased in this gallery.

Included in the gallery are some pieces from two of his series, "Viva la roboluciĆ²n!" and "Plastic Icon."

According to the artist's site, +Brauer carefully chooses vintage objects that have an industrial past, that are marked by time and whose patina have been molded by years of manual use. He admires the beauty, sometimes hidden, of these discarded industrial parts, alters their appearance, sculpts them and incorporates light sources into their structure before assembling the parts together to create a unique and poetic piece. The site also notes that right from conception, the element of light is an integral part of the artwork: each robot is designed to interact with its environment in a different way whether it is turned on or off.

"Each piece is a statement of poetic resistance to mass consumption," according to +Brauer.

With his Plastic Icon series, the artist turns to plastic, a material threatening the planet. Every second, plastic is dumped in the oceans, more than 100,000 marine mammals die every year and if the world goes on like this, there will be more plastic than fish in the oceans by 2050, explains +Brauer.

Through a series of 20th century portraits, the artist tackles this material by meticulously assembling hundreds of discarded plastic pieces from toys, pens, bottles and packaging to mundane objects of our daily lives. Each piece remains with its original color, untouched, as it was found.

In these works, +Brauer said he is playing with irony with iconic figures as he presents his personal vision of resistance to overconsumption. Right now, there are only a few finished works in the Plastic Icon series that are highlighted in this gallery, as the artist said he is still in the process of finishing the series.

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