Yann Géraud
An artist is welcomed for a residency at Lugar a Dudas, an art center in Cali, Colombia, as part of a cross-residency program. This partnership is supported by the French Embassy and the Alliance Colombo-Française in Cali.
“What do you see from where you stand?”
This phrase, taken from a Tony Touch track (Spoken Word, The Peacemaker 2, 2004), accompanies me at every moment. It helps, supports, comforts, and constantly challenges me. First, because it concerns vision, but also position, and ultimately perspective.
I neither can nor want to define the world I live in, because defining implies an end, a halt, a lack of movement. However, I do want to try to circumscribe it, to encircle it, to approach it obliquely with the forms I create. This is a stance, and these forms I produce are affirmations of that stance. These forms act as milestones placed along a trajectory, a movement of excitement and urgency.
My work embraces the idea of art as something that binds and unbinds, weaves, interlaces, or skillfully unravels, fragments, dissects, or pulverizes surfaces and spaces into an infinity of fragments that ultimately coalesce.
I gather these fragments in a kind of stubbornness, but a headless stubbornness, driven by the gut. I invent communities of forms, striving for them to be egalitarian communities that converge at a single point: sculpture. These forms aim to reveal not a reductionist mindset but a thought laid bare in its abundance, encompassing an inaccessible totality.
How can one give shape to this teeming of thought, this ant-like effect, this swarm and multitude, this feverishness? Thought, in this context, is what disrupts form and upsets an overly impeccable order. It is not to be regarded as pure disorder, but rather as an overly complex order, an entanglement and layering of different readable orders when taken individually, but whose collective reading becomes nearly impossible when all elements are gathered into a single form.
What is at stake here is the complexity of thought taking form.
Simultaneously, I invoke the radicality of taking action to exhort this encounter between art and life, between Ares and Aphrodite—the violent assertion of a gesture that precipitates and crystallizes thought and decision into form.
My work is the battleground of this war between the imperialism of form, the overwhelming power of inherently structured and structuring thought, and the allure of the unreadable, the unnameable, and the ineffable. (text by the artist)
