About landscapes
Fabien Yvon’s paintings, engravings and drawings are above all mental images. It is in the moment of manufacture that memories of lived experiences, landscapes observed while driving, and memories of works mingle. Richter, Turner, Boudin, or even Victor Hugo, encountered on the walls of museums or between the pages of books, nourish memories of landscapes seen. Photos taken while driving, never used directly, have the same function of capturing and accumulating strata.
The landscapes are born from the meeting of these mental images and the traces left by certain technical gestures. Brush, rag, wiper, plastic ruler, window cleaner, or any other object nearby allows you to draw paint on the canvas, whip, blot, erase, scrape. The random leaves margins, surprises, the medium allows the resumes. For engravings and drawings, the gestures are more precise, anticipated and drawn with a certain mastery. The tool requires more precision while always leaving a margin of indecision. The knowledge of a medium nourishes the relation with another.
Total absence of architecture, or of human trace, it is the word landscape however, which structures these compositions. Often two horizontal parts, more or less distinct, without certainty of scale, where the sky can become sea. Sometimes the image is sharper, the projection is more precise and could encourage to see the capture of a landscape seen , even recognized. The usual vocabulary, mountains, clouds, mineral or aquatic effect, comes to meet the materials, hatching, points, effects of superimpositions, and assembles them
in the unity of an almost precise evocation of landscape.
About the printed gesture
“What interests me in the dark is not so much the reason for its use as the surprise of its result. Play with the gap between the staging of the work and what remains of it in terms of traces, imprints, impressions. Sometimes at the limit of legibility between action and production, the process and its theatricality make it possible to leave the space of the painting and put it back into play. The video leads to re-determine the links between the image, the action and performance space. Also determining, the attachment device accentuates and reveals this reflection of displacement.
Naming and titling are also work and play with the spectators, either by further disturbing their reception or by revealing the production processes. It is a way of entering with humor in this intimate space located between the spectator and the work. It is also a kind of minimal dialogue in which I try to redefine my action. The ambiguity, the shift are then assumed as part of the game.
Video is not so much a means of recording the performance of the manufacturing as another moment of turmoil. Sometimes much stronger than the object produced and seeming disproportionate in relation to this result, it makes it possible to keep visible the staging, the assumed and almost ceremonial gestures of pictorial actions recorded on media. For example, the unchecked arrow starts from the eye, continues aiming and then releases in its trajectory what makes painting. ”
Fabien Yvon
