“Seeking to give body to the organicity of ink, tested by water and salt on paper, I have drawn a breath, immersed in a flow of air, light, matter. Body to body with the lungs of the world, to which our existences are connected. Yann Bagot engages in a real hand-to-hand encounter with the landscape, drawing in situ, with ink, water and salt, the chaos of rocks or the mosses and trunks of forests. Similar to this “living stained glass” that he sees in “the breakthrough of light through the foliage,” his work is a flow of matter, shadow, and light.
Partly the fruit of chance – due to the use of water and salt – his rocks and “pitted” bark seem to breathe and throb in their concretions. Frozen flows – and yet seeming to move – of blacks and grays spangled with saline whiteness, as if crystallized, the flows, like the stain, constantly oscillating between form and formlessness, become metaphors of life, and draw, in vivo, the movements and the organic metamorphoses. Antediluvian crystallizations, his monumental rocks, in their silvery and powdery coats, also appear as a metaphor of time. From the vegetal to the mineral, in communion with the sap oozing and crackling under the mosses and the bark, the spray and the breath of the wind caressing the immobile stones, Yann Bagot tries to “intensify the powers of the matter.” An almost alchemical quest, fascinating and magnificent.
The intimate hour of the world
Personal exhibition at the Robet Dantec Gallery in Belfort until December 17, 2022 www.galerierobertdantec.com
Also at the Atelier Tristan Vyskoc in Paris for a collective exhibition until January 13, 2023
www.yannbagot.com
Stéphanie Dulout