Born in 1973 in Le Havre from an art lover and a photographer, JOACHIM ROMAIN developed a predisposition for observing and photographically capturing the mood of the advertising remnants in the backstreets of his native city of Le Havre. His work is the mirror of his environment, his personal and artistic perception of the world around him.

Since then, he has traveled across cities and countries, tirelessly capturing changes of the street. He collects images of stratified advertising posters, eroding walls covered in graffiti, accumulations of paper and organic matter littering the ground or clinging to poles, railings, promotional columns, gas and electric boxes... He roams the streets in search of clusters degraded by human hands, weathered and decomposed by time.

Following in the footsteps of the Nouveau Réalisme movement and artists like Villeglé and Hains, Joachim Romain works with the materials the city offers him. Initially, he used photography to report on his observations of urban poster walls, but he has now adopted it to capture our age when images overwhelm us, whether in cities or on the internet. His Fast Shop series is based on photographs of online sales sites. These images reveal bodies, models of brands, that seem almost to disappear, reflecting the excessive speed of the consumer trend. The glossy photograps accentuate the effect of sublimation, reinforcing the appeal of advertising images as they would appear on a screen.

Over the years, Joachim Romain has linked his work to the urban world by damaging his own photographs, thus testifying to the effects of time. He creates portraits inserted into an accumulation of advertising images, blending into the multitude of colored textures and fragments of typography. He continues his artistic practice by creating sculptures from materials collected in the street, giving life to a palimpsest of shapes and textures that deteriorate over time. Combining his photography with his work on street materials, Joachim Romain merges his Fast Shop series with his collages of reworked torn posters.

Through his creations, Joachim Romain depicts cities marked by the accumulation of images, slogans and posters that solicit our attention and incite the desire to buy, generating a constant flow of production and waste. Over time, his works become archives of the world, relics of an era when images were always omnipresent.