Juillet 2009
Two spaces and a border. A desacralized chapel has been divided on its bias into two opposing spaces, between which stands a singular barricade, a war memorial bristling with sharp ridges, the remains of a past work.
First space: a workshop. Along the walls, shelves and a work surface were used to make papier-mâché craters and volcanoes, small machines in which eruptions of paint were triggered. Here and there, small pictures painted on different supports, pieces of plank or pizza box cardboard, also represent erupting volcanoes. Here, a work and production space is depicted, momentarily at a standstill but capable of restarting at any moment.
Second space: a warehouse. Whereas the first showed signs of recent hustle and bustle, this one is cold, motionless, giving off an atmos- phere akin to that of a suburban area lit by a few streetlamps. It could be the street. Or an open area where urban equipment is stored. A place alien to humans and life. Four sculptural proposals, all with the same rectangular base, are lined up two by two: a double row of garden lights, a right-angled pool table, a painted plywood base, a white plastic tent housing neon lights.
A border: the artist’s previous exhibition, Erehwon P.O.V, presented in the spring at La salle de bains in Lyon, was dismantled and then used as material to create a barricade, a construction made with whatever means at hand, used for defense or attack, and separating two territories in conflict. The piece is approximately two meters high and ten meters long. It has the dimensions of a monument to com- batants as produced by military art. It shares its heroism and lyricism, but is abstracted. The main structure of Panic Raide, a work created with Georges Tony Stoll in Paris in the spring of 2008, made of broken lines running through whirlpools, suggested the same momentum and displayed the same sculptural qualities, the balance between mass and movement suggested by the guiding lines that structure it. This central part articulates the two opposing spaces by opposing each of its faces in turn.
This central part establishes a material rather than thematic link between the artist’s two exhibitions. This seems to me one of the hall- marks of Yann Géraud’s work.
Erehwon P.O.V was an exhibition about the spirit of his work, i.e. the state of mind in which he produces and wishes to continue produ- cing art (see previous review). This spirit was expressed in material terms: imitating the efficiency of industry with one’s own hands. This concern for material independence seems to me to be a condition for the artist’s intellectual freedom.
Expression Janus poses other problems relating to production, showing pieces produced in a workshop, a place where manual work is carried out, and in a warehouse, a place or building where something is deposited.
Yann Géraud is a materialist artist. By insisting in this way on the materiality of his work, he seems to me to pose problems specific to his condition as an artist and, through this honesty, to be able to enter into communication with all men who still have eyes to see, heads to think and hands to work.