«A work of art is always the destruction of something, but it only destroys because it then rebuilds something else». Drawing on this paradigm, Yann Géraud is developing a work of radical deconstruction of sculpture and in situ reconfiguration of the exhibition space, somewhere between formal bulimia and visionary cosmogony.
When it comes to sculpture, stakhanovist Yann Géraud doesn’t do things by halves, even if it means paying the ultimate price. On the strength of an impressive exhibition a few months ago at the Salle de Bains in Lyon (Erewhon P.O.V, which already encompassed a staggering range of mediums and materials), the plasterboard tormentor is back with no less than eight hand-repeated sculptures, and not the least of them: Sparsile Sculptures! Yes, ladies and gentlemen, you read that right! Not one, not two, but eight sparsile sculptures, with the added bonus of a glove and an execution! There’s no need for solemnity: in the title, which is a bit like a promo on a pack of Kronenbourg, Yann Géraud immediately defuses the happy few clientelism of contemporary art to place himself under the ironic sign of the Guinness Book of Records mixed with gory cinema, metaphysics and astronomy (the term ‘sparsile’ refers to those shapeless stars not listed by astronomers). A protean heap, a reification of abstract concepts and a permanent work in progress in which the most varied media and techniques come together, Yann Geraud’s rhizome-sculptures are most often the result of a long gestation process, with semantic games and associations of ideas battling it out, accompanied by notebooks and sketches that record sources of inspiration excavated from the cosmic depths of human history. This Sparsile Sculpture, manually duplicated eight times, pushes the envelope even further, inviting the viewer into a mise en abîme more dizzying than a rollercoaster.
Formlessness at its best
Strolling through the aisles that separate the eight assemblages, you are struck by a destabilising effect, similar to that you might feel in a hall of mirrors, not by the depth of field multiplied by the mirrors but by the play of transparencies, the multiplication of angles of view and skewed perspectives. These heterogeneous aggregates, solidly anchored to a framework of metal, plasterboard and wood, play on a variety of forms and mediums, evoking a choice of: a funfair shack under construction, the reverse side of a grand guignol set, a postmodern cabinet of curiosities, a post-Katrina pavilion, a butcher’s workbench set up by an astrophysicist or a building site ransacked by a neurotic architect. Obsessively unfolding, each module is made up of
each module is made up of tangled objects, the inventory of which is in itself a poem: a papier-mâché model of a volcano with an orange dripping paint
A succession of debad paintings based on a bottle of bleach inverted at the centre of an orange circle, suspended by metal cables and arranged in ascending order like optical lenses; an armada of plaster reproductions of the Three Monkeys of Wisdom, stripped of their primary faculties, enthroned on a rail reminiscent of the ‘shoot’em up’ of shooting galleries; a trio of axes, two-thirds of them painted black, planted in rough wooden pilings; a meat cleaver; a blind door riddled with holes like so many «places of interference»; photo- graphic reproductions of the figure of an enucleated Greek statue; and finally, a miniature red head mounted on a thick metal rod that towers over the whole. Yann Géraud is proud of this frenetic pace («Always faster! Always crazier! Always louder!»), like a challenge to
the notion of the manufactured product, which the artist resists and competes with using whatever means are at hand: the application, pragmatic rigour and rationalism that such a project requires, in the manner of Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau revisited by Martin Kippenber- ger. A labyrinthine, convoluted work, Sculpture Sparsile Six Pack + 33% Free radicalises the gesture of manual replication, diverting the methods of industrial productivism towards an act on a human scale, with all its precious imperfections, its heart and its spirit. If assem- bly-line work is circumscribed by the imperatives of output and efficiency, Yann Géraud rejoices in being, on the other hand, a willing exploiter of his own counter-productive system.
In his reflections on bricolage, Levi-Strauss argues that “the composition of the whole [...] is the contingent result of all the opportunities that have arisen to renew or enrich the stock, or to maintain it with the residues of previous constructions and destruc- tions”. Does this mean that Yann Géraud is a DIY genius? In any case, he conveys the exhilaration of “garage-made” duplication and recycling to the point of absurdity. There's a conquistador aspect to his work, a willingness to stick to the material with disproportionate ambitions and limited means, to challenge the very practice of sculpture to the point of “giving form to the workings of the mind”, as advocated by artist Dennis Oppenheim. This upheaval of values and permanent self-cannibalism is at the heart of the creative process of this Sculpture Sparsile, striving for the deepening and disparity of forms in ever tenuous tensions between anarchic de-zoning and rigorous construction, formlessness and perfection, trash and immaculate. Any attempt at completion or finiteness is perpetually defused by the emergence of a new stratum overlaying the first. Yann Géraud's installations seem destined to remain in a state of perpetuum mobile, suspended between earth and space until entropy and dispersion into cosmic dust.
Alone against all
As if to drive the point home, Yann Géraud even treated us to a congruous portion of rabe by placing five casts of his fingers in the corridor on plasterboard residues coated with a builder’s orange lacquer with an inimitable Bricorama patina. In a small way, this Paul Thek-style piece, improvised in situ, underlines the necessity of the sculptural gesture and the manual imprint - human, and therefore approximate - against the tricks of mass production. The importance of being human in an age of blind consumerism, artistic deception and other Western subterfuge? Maintaining such a radical stance is no easy task in an age of instant seduction, tawdry vulgarity and careerism of all kinds.
But that’s not all. To see the EXECUTION taking place on the first floor, please take the stairs leading to the scaffold. Although less prolific, this piece creates equally disconcerting mental and visual analogies: the structure of a guillotine is echoed in a makeshift diving board, while a plaster crate of onions serves as a receptacle for the severed heads. Here, the most fluid minimalism rubs shoulders with baroque craftsmanship, resonating with both the seriousness of the subject and the cheap effects of gore cinema, whose excess serves as cathartic subversion. The volumes, more massive and rectilinear, are covered in pink and green lacquered flats. A dozen decapitated plaster busts play elbows with the spectre of Bruce Nauman, while on a slope hidden from view a cubic volume stands out in a painted science-fiction model that some might consider kitsch. These seemingly disparate elements are assembled according to a logic that is, on the whole, rational, in harmony with the polysemic quality of the word ‘execution’: whatever his design may be, is the artist not the ultimate executor? Hence the allegory of the guillotine.
Noël Dolla’s flannel set in resin is a nod to another artist who, like Yann Géraud, never hesitated to get his hands dirty. This miniature piece, unearthed from the Frac’s collection, pops up unexpectedly on a white wall, at the risk of going (deliberately?) unnoticed.
While many artists of the same generation share this sense of reappropriating the vernacular and multiplicity against the sacrosanct monolithic form (examples are legion), the off-roader Yann Géraud trumps them all by dispensing with postmodern tics to develop a singular cosmogony against all odds, The result of an introspection that reveals itself through hard work, reminding us of the Herculean effort of «alone against all», the opposite of pop neo-minimalism with its meticulous finishes and minimal danger - so chic and trendy. There remains in his work a derisorily heroic and humbly victorious vision of the solitary crossing and conquest, which is also a metaphor for the work of the artist: to fix a line, a point of horizon, to materialise mental images, to complete a journey, a voyage through myth - even if it is ultimately static. The reward, strictly ontological, is commensurate with the effort made.