Bio
Yann Dumoget was born in France in 1970. He currently lives and works in Le Cailar (Camargue). 
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Born in 1970, Yann Dumoget began his artistic activity at the end of the 1980s. At that time, he borrowed road signs which he painted before putting them back into circulation. Then, at the beginning of the 90s, alongside his studies in art history at Paul Valéry University in Montpellier, he got involved in a rock group founded with friends until becoming a professional musician for a few years. during which he created sets, record covers, posters and advertising materials for this small group which travels across France.
Leaving this adventure for a stay of a few months across the Atlantic, he decided on his return to devote himself exclusively to painting, but a painting strongly influenced by graffiti culture. His experience of live performance and his sociable temperament lead him to develop a contributory process which consists of asking those he meets to add the final touch to his productions by intervening on them with small indelible markers. In 1998, during his first exhibition held in Montpellier, visitors were invited to comment directly on the paintings using them as a guestbook. Encouraged by two exhibitions in Germany and Japan, he decided to spend the entire year of 1999 in his small studio to carry out a performance consisting of painting one work per day for a year, or 366 paintings for the year 2000. On this occasion, he invites the public daily to come to the workshop to express themselves using the same process.
Settling shortly after in Berlin, the reading in 2002 of Nicolas Bourriaud’s essay defining relational aesthetics met with significant resonance with him and the central practice of graffiti in his works was then structured around different protocols of encounter. Taking place in public spaces, in private homes, most of the time outside the “white cube”, these micro-events rarely go beyond the perimeter of their neighborhood and assume a modesty of ambition as well as means. This local art imposes itself as a necessary counterpoint to major exhibition-events and the globalized art market. In 2002, himself making fun of this modesty which was more suffered than truly chosen, he invited himself to Documenta 11 in Kassel by taking over the only places that no one has ever thought of claiming: the toilets of the exhibition areas. He also takes the opportunity to hack the official website of the event and direct visitors to his own site, Doklomenta on which an experimental module allows visitors to graffiti his paintings remotely via the mouse, which will constitute one of the first virtual graffiti tools in the history of the Internet.
At the end of 2003, after writing a long farewell letter to the German capital in the form of an (unpublished) novel, Rêve Berlinois, he returned to the sweetness of the south of France. From 2004 to 2007, eager to continue to explore in all directions the way in which the artistic, economic and civic concerns that drive him are articulated, he retained the practice of graffiti as the driving force behind his creation but the influence of relational aesthetics encourages him to extend his thoughts to the point of designing a unique distribution circuit for each new project: board game, exquisite pictorial corpse, humanitarian action, Do it yourself painting, he multiplies social experiments to the point of feel less and less the need to resort to paint.
In 2008, he temporarily abandoned it and initiated Le chant des pistes, a wandering around the world which continued until 2010. The pretext was the delivery on the principle of the concatenation of messages written and drawn by his meetings of a day. This adventure being for him a way of playing on the ambiguity of the term postman. Because, unlike his series of 366 paintings for the year 2000 for which he produced, so to speak, « on an assembly line », he then becomes an artist who does not make anything. Except for a few photos and, as if by mirror effect, an intense epistolary production intended for personalities from the art world to which he engages on a daily basis.
On his return in 2011, one of his correspondents, the art historian Paul Ardenne, gave him the opportunity to present the Report of his trip in the form of an installation at the Espace Vuitton in Paris for the Ailleurs exhibition. Marked by the crisis whose explosion he was able to measure on a world scale and by the insurmountable gap between his condition as a Western traveler and the chronic poverty of certain populations which in fact prohibits him from any contact as equals, this This takes the disillusioned form of a zero level of relational experience materialized only by the traces of financial transactions: invoices, tickets, receipts kept throughout his journey. Oscillating between political commitment and self-deprecation, his practice, in which the text holds a preponderant place, becomes through his encounters and his questioning a poetic way of negotiating with the realities of a world in convulsion.
From 2010, he traveled to many countries in economic crisis: Iceland, Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy to create, with great sobriety of means, works calling on different forms of expression: action, installation , photography, collage, video, sculpture which he then exhibits in galleries and art centers. In counterpoint, he gradually returned to painting. From 2010 – undoubtedly to take stock and symbolically pick up the pieces of a two-year adventure around the world which left him in pieces – he cut his paintings, sews them, glues them, recomposes them. From 2013 to 2015, he reversed the shared painting process to develop a Pictovirus consisting of small pieces of cut-out paints that he applied virally to the paintings of his studio neighbors. At the same time, he continues to organize graffiti meetings on large paintings, like those presented in 2018 at the Espace Bagouet in Montpellier for the exhibition With real pieces of people inside. The values highlighted in shared painting, altruism, tolerance, hospitality, solidarity resolutely assert themselves as the necessary antidote to the pessimistic observation formalized in his works on the crisis.