Yoann Estevenin
Sculpteur
Confronted with Yoann Estevenin’s work, I’ve often thought of René Char’s adage, from “Rougeur des matinaux”: “Impose your luck, squeeze your happiness and go towards your risk. They’ll get used to looking at you. It’s easy to believe that with this artist, it’s all about illusions, wonderlands and other fabuloseries.
That’s perfectly true, of course.
But let’s turn it inside out, like turning over a glove, after an evening out, at nightfall, in the secret of an alcove.
All that has gone before is released at once: the last notes of music, drops of heady elixirs, intoxicating fragrances, furtive or intense kisses, shimmering glances, snatches of conversation, dust of unconquered hopes, final thoughts.
What Estevenin’s works whisper to us is precisely this sovereign reality of the night, this unstoppable truth arising from the unexpected embodiment of our desires and hopes.
There, lurking in the depths of this reality and truth, you will find no difference between life and dream, the ordinary and the extraordinary.
“We have broken our ties with the past times of our ancestors. We no longer learn from nights and dreams.”
It’s all one journey, one story, one drift along the river of time. It is said that Placidas, a Roman general, while on a hunting trip, was overwhelmed by the unexpected arrival of a white stag bearing a radiant cross between its antlers, while a voice apostrophized him: “How long will you pursue the beasts in the forests? How long will this passion make you forget the salvation of your soul?” He then converted to Christianity and took the name of Eustathios/Eustathe – Eustache in our language.* Yoann Estevenin’s works are of this order: like singular apparitions, they leave the walls on which they are hung, the pedestals on which they are patiently arranged or the sheets of paper on which they are preciously drawn, to come towards us with all their strength and brilliance, the better to deliver a few secret words that shine in the darkness of the world like so many fireflies in the sky.
