Carte blanche to Yann L’Outsider is the inaugural exhibition of a long-term collaboration between Hatchikian Gallery and the Quai 36 Art Production House. Yann L’Outsider has been the link between these two partners, accompanying his artistic research: Hatchikian Gallery for the works in the studio and Quai 36 for the realization of monumental projects in public space. We had the opportunity to tell the beautiful story of these encounters in our previous Art Paper (to read again here).
Carte blanche to Yann L’Outsider, composed of three sequences of exhibitions and events taking place from February 5 to June 8, 2022, will offer a unique scenographic framework for discovering the artist’s work in its various forms. The event will take place in the recently established space of Quai 36 within the cultural hub of the Fondation Fiminco in Romainville.
An exhibition in 3 tempos to experience the full scope of Yann L’Outsider’s work.
This exceptional and original presentation of Yann L’Outsider’s work will be punctuated by three sequences that each highlight a particular dimension of the aesthetic research that animates the artist: an opportunity to explore and experience the full range of the work. The three sequences are called Tempos because, precisely, a reflection on the temporality of the creative act underlies Yann L’Outsider’s work, which constantly questions how to reconcile the brilliance of the restless gestural expression of urban art with the introspective course of research in the studio. In his artistic quest, the artist confronts two relationships to time whose antinomy is the source of creative tension.
Yann L’Outsider, a journey between urban art and the workshop.
Yann L’Outsider has long practiced urban art fueled by the adrenaline generated by interventions on the fringes of legality, carried out in an emergency and with discomfort that precipitate an instinctive, even impulsive, creation without premeditation. This intensity makes the artist fully alive and present in his act, engaging his entire being in a creative choreography that is both nonchalant and determined. For Yann L’Outsider, this imbalance is particularly stimulating, and it is this sensation that he intends to preserve when re-deploying his work in the studio. He is indeed seeking to translate the sincerity of spontaneous emergence in the urban environment onto the canvas. To cope with these two contexts, namely public space and the ritual of the workshop, Yann L’Outsider sometimes imposes constraints on himself in terms of time, material, and low light conditions, as if these were obstacles and limitations that create a paradoxical state of tranquility that is conducive to the artist’s free and unconstrained expression. Although the workshop work often evokes the sense of imposture inherent to urban artists turning to legitimate means of creative expression, it offers Yann L’Outsider the opportunity to enrich his aesthetic language with new experiments. Avoiding closed-minded reasons, certainties, and a form of artistic inertia, he always allows the unpredictable to emerge: a quest for vibrations animates this artist, who often invites us to contemplate his works as if we were letting ourselves be carried away by a musical score.
An exhibition in three tempos, for different movements of the work.
Three Tempos, an original rhythm conceived and staged to echo the dialectical tension that runs through Yann L’Outsider’s work: the presentation proposed by Hatchikian Gallery x Quai 36 will allow the various movements that mark the direction of the artist’s work to be deployed.
Metaphorical abstraction in chiaroscuro and the emergence of light.
The Tempo 1 will take place from February 5 to March 5. It will unveil a series of works on canvas through which Yann L’Outsider engages in an aesthetic exploration of metaphorical abstraction. The effects of black monochromes are emphasized by a projection of white paint revealing a play of shadows and lights that draws us into an irresistible mystery, like an introspective vertigo. The artist prepares the material for his canvas in volumes, recreating, in a certain way, the roughness and brutality of the walls, giving the support the relief of a story marked by the roughnesses. The white aerosol will encounter this material and reveal its protruding forms. The meeting between the real texture and the artist’s gestural presence involves that part of the unpredictable that will bring a singular and disturbing light from the darkness, a fascinating enigma that perhaps everyone experiences from their own history. Yann L’Outsider is deeply inspired by the observation of cosmic phenomena, the dynamics of elements, and the confrontation between material and immaterial dimensions, which he tries to translate into the graphic language of pictorial abstraction. The vibrations of light and dark, the emergence of lines and rays, give an intrinsic dynamism to the works that are highly imbued with a dual questioning of space and time. This first Tempo will open with a performance by the artist on the opening day, February 5, from 2pm to 7pm. Yann L’Outsider will create a mural on the facade of the Quai 36 space, where the works from this first sequence will be exhibited. This is a way of juxtaposing the wall and the canvas and thus activating the tension that runs through his work.
The Movement of the Rains, 2021
Aerosol and acrylic on canvas
4.5 x 2.8 m
Typographic abstraction and its wanderings.
The second Tempo will be open from March 10 to April 16 for a second month of exhibition dedicated to another field of artistic research. It will highlight the typographic abstraction work of Yann L’Outsider. The search for the aesthetics of the letter is part of the DNA of the graffitist, who unfolds the alphabet of a formal game with multiple possible interpretations, like the architectural construction or deconstruction of a plastic grammar. The letters decompose and reassemble themselves infinitely in Yann L’Outsider’s graphic universe. The artist invites us to contemplate his typographic abstractions by welcoming them as such, without trying to decipher them but rather to appreciate their intrinsic beauty without being disturbed by meaning, to accept and support the absence of meaning, to detach ourselves from explanation and its referents. Yann L’Outsider sees this research as an allegory of the artist with an incomprehensible language facing a viewer who is persistently seeking to grasp the ultimate truth of the work or facing the lawsuit of illegitimacy prompted by urban practice. The letter is a veritable creative obsession for Yann L’Outsider, whose gaze always seeks the typographic form during his wanderings: a topography of landscape, an angle of buildings, a natural manifestation, all places that are sometimes unconventional in which the artist’s eye can see a letter to explore. This search for typographic signs in the environment, Yann L’Outsider has traced in a abecedarium made on Polaroid film that will be presented at Tempo 2, offering a behind-the-scenes look at the sources of inspiration. Furthermore, a video projection will offer a retrospective of Yann L’Outsider’s interventions in public space, accompanied by a filmed interview to question the relationship to the specific time of creation in the outdoors, from the discovery and appropriation of the places to the traces of the work destined to disappear at the whim of the winds, washed away by the rain or scorched by the sun, or even dragged into the destruction of an abandoned slum.
Storm, 2022
Aerosol and acrylic on canvas
195 x 130 cm
The stylized representation of the artistic choreography.
The third Tempo, from April 21 to June 8, will present a more figurative dimension to Yann L’Outsider’s work. Although abstraction is at the heart of his approach, this exploration is not opposed to his purpose, as it still relates to his research on ways of transcribing graffiti sensations on canvas, within the framework of the workshop. The artist has worked on the kinetic representation of the graffiti gesture. In this Tempo, it is the relationship to space that is put to the test, through a series of works inspired by choreography. Graffiti dance and gesture share the common trait of the appropriation of space by the moving body, an energy that the artist translates into his stylized figures. In the instinctive gesture of graffiti, it is the movement of the body that gives rise to form, as an extension of the being, charged with its impulses and pulsations. In dance as in graffiti, movement is imbued with the dual tension between the interior and the exterior, the intimate and the extraminimal. What is the invisible force that animates the unfolding of form in this creative drive, and what does the artist seek to highlight through the lines of his figures?
Carte Blanche, a presentation that opens up all the horizons of the artist.
This White Card thus offers an unprecedented and multidimensional perspective for the work of the artist, which juxtaposes the perspective of the studio and that of the public space, the canvas and the wall surface, and it is the time-space of creation, in all its complexity and paradoxes, that is put into question, in tension, through an aesthetic kinetic that is charged with vibrations that we invite you to discover, rediscover, in the rhythm of these different Tempos that lead us into the energy of a singular piece. White Card by Yann L’outsider, from February 5 to June 8, an exhibition in 3 Tempos presented by Hatchikian Gallery x Quai 36, an exhibition space in the Quai 36 area within the cultural hub of the Fiminco Foundation in Romainville. Do not hesitate to contact us for any additional information. We will be happy to meet you at the vernissages and events that will punctuate this Carte Blanche and we will be delighted to collect your artistic emotions during your journey through the work of Yann L’Outsider.
