Yann Géraud
Yann Géraud lives and works in France
” ‘What do you see from where you stand?’ This phrase, taken from a piece by Tony Touch (Spoken Word, The Peacemaker 2, 2004), accompanies me at every moment. It helps me, supports me, reassures me, and always and again questions me. First of all, because it is about vision but also about position, and ultimately about point of view.
I cannot and do not want to give a definition of the world I live in, because defining implies the end, the stop, and the non-movement. Instead, I want to try to circumscribe it, to surround it, to approach it obliquely with the forms I create. It is a position, and these forms I make are the affirmation of these positions. These forms are milestones placed on a trajectory, a movement of excitement and precipitation.
I work within this idea of art that consists of binding and unbinding, weaving, intertwining, or carefully undoing, crumbling, parceling out, pulverizing the surface or space into an infinity of fragments that eventually form a mass. I gather these fragments with a sort of stubbornness, but a stubbornness without a head, coming from the guts.
I invent communities of forms, and I want them to be communities of equals that gather at a single point, which is sculpture. They must reveal not a reductionist thought, but a thought laid bare in its profusion, embracing an inaccessible totality.
How to give form to this proliferation of thought, this effect of a beehive, this wriggling and multitude, this feverishness? Thought would be what disturbs the form and disrupts a too-perfect order. Not that it should be considered pure disorder, but rather as a too complex order, an entanglement and superimposition of different readable orders if taken separately, but whose reading becomes almost impossible when all these elements are gathered into a single form.
What is at stake is ultimately the complexity of thought taking form.
And at the same time, I invoke the radicality of the act to exhort this meeting of art and life, of Ares and Aphrodite; the violent assertion of the gesture that precipitates and crystallizes thought and decision into form.
My work is the battlefield of this war between the imperialism of form, the all-powerful, inevitably structuring and structured thought, and the temptation of the unreadable, the unnameable, and the unspeakable.” – Yann Géraud, February 2011
