Rom av.JC is the artistic alter ego of Romain Hurdequint.

Armed with spray cans, acrylic, marker, or clay, he reinvents the representations of ancient leisure activities. Placing the skateboard at the heart of gladiatorial combat or the first events of the Olympic Games, the artist rewrites the history of this discipline. Shaped like jars with Greco-Roman motifs, the boards bear witness to the practice of skateboarding at a time when the city of Lyon was called Lugdunum.

Like the ceramics of the Greco-Roman period, the worn skateboard is marked by its time. If the temporality is far from being the same, the bruises are similar. Broken, hammered, completely reduced to pieces, the skateboards at the end of their lives are like those vases that resurface hundreds of years later: imperfect, but full of history.

In the manner of kintsugi and its respect for wabi-sabi, he seeks to care for what remains of the skateboard and to recognize the beauty in its imperfections. It is a question of restoring the board without masking the traces left by its use, but by rewriting its history. The abused skateboard is ennobled by taking on a new life… antique.

Text by Elisaveta Prokopchuk