Yannick Papailhau

Yannick Papailhau lives and works in Marseille.

“SMALL poetic journey

From effective existence to other dimensions. I noticed an analogy between writing, drawing, and volume; the method, how things come together, adjust, unfold? First letters, words, sentences, a story, then the line, the shape, the color, a sketch, and finally fragments, a structure, a body, a sculpture. Writing gives meaning… gives meaning. Initially, this discovery seemed obvious to me, because writing always participates in the proper development of the work, it allows us to sort, organize our ideas, but writing is also about complicating, fragmenting, multiplying creative possibilities. A study, that of the world, caught in a continual whirlwind of digging within which things blossom, build, unfold over and over again, in which our perceptions are shaken, excited, exalted. There would be an element capable of stopping this instability dead in its tracks, that of the gaze, the simple act of placing our eyes, those two little marbles, could freeze the moment, crystallize the object for an instant. Our head is a shell in which tricks, methods, secrets, echoes, noises, shocks, fizzing, crackling, sparkling are concentrated. I often asked myself this question as a child about my first vision of the world, well, not the very first obviously, well buried in my brain, but the one of a five-year-old child staring at the ground for several seconds, and discovering a land retracting on itself. This impression of the world repeated itself several times until… Until not so long ago. Understanding that any object could fly away like a butterfly, is realizing the importance of matter, imagining its future, sniffing its crest. A fascination for mathematics, my wet mute reason in front of this edifice, a paradoxical feeling that pushes me to begin this SMALL poetic journey, between fanciful theories and abstract stories, the formidable yearling will lead me to the discovery of the amphigoric

… All romanticized at will, sprinkled with poetic charges, rinsed little devil with cold water.” – Yannick Papailhau

Yannick Papailhau’s work in on display during the exhibition Sylvain Ciavaldini, Anthony Duchêne, Yannick Papailhau, Alexandra Pellissier - offsite, 2008