The Hatchikian gallery is pleased to present the exhibition of Yann L’Outsider, which brings together a dozen works on canvas by this young contemporary artist. This exhibition can be seen at the Art Loft until November 30, 2021.
Brief biography
Yann L’Outsider was born in 1984. Attached to his native Brittany, he lives and works there today, more precisely in Pont-Aven. Brittany, a land of entrepreneurs, simplicity and proximity to nature, with its beautiful landscapes, is a great source of inspiration for L’Outsider, just as it has been for other great French artists who have participated in his renowned work. In a very contemporary artistic practice, he began at the age of 17 to learn the codes and techniques of graffiti – he is fascinated by the freedom and energy of this practice that freely invades urban space. His interest in craftsmanship and creation leads him to integrate the Boulle School in Paris in 2006, where he studied enamel art. In parallel with that, and since the 2000s, he paints. He develops a characteristic style shaped by architecture, graphic design, contemporary art, and expanded by the diversity of cultures, particularly Asian ones, which inspire him through the medium of calligraphy. The year 2015 marks a fascinating and radical shift in L’Outsider’s artistic practice; color gradually disappears from his compositions, and the lettering, too, evokes a painting synthesized in abstraction and close to constructivism, where the observer can see metaphysical questions emerging. L’Outsider remains very attached to the movement and the dynamic of the gesture present in graffiti; he has decided to continue his research in the environment of his studio after having done so in large-scale murals in France, Ireland, Vietnam, and South Africa. L’Outsider’s works are born from an «endless quest» for beauty and aesthetics, a quest that is simultaneously «glorious and terrifying»…
From urban art to the workshop
In his artistic research, Yann L’outsider plays with the dualities that constitute his work. His orientation towards working in the studio, about ten years ago, inevitably transformed the conditions of creation, placing the artist in a different temporal context, turning him towards more standardized media, yet Yann L’outsider never ceases to seek to recreate the state of stillness, urgency, imbalance, or discomfort that may have stimulated the creative drive in urban environments. An inspiration without premeditation. In the studio, Yann L’outsider often imposes time or material constraints, imposes limits, obstacles, or low light conditions, in order to recapture the conditions that generate the adrenaline of a practice at the margins of legality. This is how the artist feels alive, present in his creative act. Yann L’outsider intends to translate on canvas the sincerity and brilliance that are the essence of spontaneity and creative freedom. A singular way of dealing with these two contexts, namely public space and the ritual of the studio, and of «de-sacralizing» the canvas, at the cost of the persistent sense of imposture that is characteristic of artists. Yann L’outsider employs an aesthetic that is detached from dogma and that transcribes the gestural choreography of street art in a nonchalant and dazzling way. While the studio allows for the channeling of prolific creation, it should not become a comfort zone for the reproduction of series of works endlessly reduced to a certain number of variations. The artist experiments, welcomes the unordinary, sometimes thinks he is wrong, and still seeks; he never succumbs to aesthetic inertia. Like a language that renews itself and enriches itself through a practice that encompasses multiple situations, Yann Le Berre’s work evolves, highly imbued with its own vibration, from this constant quest that keeps the artist distanced from the paralyzing certainties.
A typographic and cosmic abstraction
Another duality nourishes Yann’s inspiration: the duality between the urban and the rural, the duality between abstraction and phenomenology. The artist, who says he is urban by accident and who now lives on the lands of Brittany, is imbued with a family culture woven from the destinies of humble lives spent working the land. This duality constitutes the singularity of L’outsider, which draws inspiration from the observation of nature, the long cycles, and the strength of the elements, particularly palpable in Brittany. Transcribing on the canvas the confrontation between the material and immaterial dimensions, the infinitely small and the infinitely large, interpreting in the language of pictorial abstraction the clash of wind, the breath of the mists, the unrest of the waves, and the rhythm of the rain. Perhaps this is a way to perpetuate the family narrative with his own language, to prolong the learning process, to make the memory of the gesture that is passed on imperceptibly from generation to generation his own. This gestural expression, never consciously realized or theorized, is deployed by the artist in his own way in the creative act. From this foundation and this history, Yann Le Berre draws a humility and sincerity that are the grammar of his artistic expression. Honoring his debt of life to those who came before does not prevent him from asserting his uniqueness, forging his own path, opening up to other places, and the artist composes with this richness to explore all the nuances that foil oppositions.
A selection of works presented by Hatchikian Gallery
Hatchikian Gallery is pleased to present a selection of emblematic aerosol and acrylic on canvas works by Yann L’outsider, representative of his evolution towards typographic abstraction and cosmic abstraction. The series of five Typogram #1, #2, #3, #4, #5 at 24×30 cm and the two Typogram #6 and #7 at 50×65 cm, created in 2020, are inspired by a Chinese game, Tan Gram, a puzzle of shapes derived from a square that decompose and reassemble themselves infinitely. A formal game that the artist translated into the 26 letters of the alphabet to imagine a typographic abstraction with multiple possible interpretations, which should be contemplated without deciphering it, welcoming it as it is.
Image gallery
