Artist: Yoan Sorin
Exhibition title: Chronique De L’oubli
Curated by: 40m cube and Yoan Sorin
Venue: 40m cube, Rennes, France
Date: May 25 – September 22, 2024
Photography: Margot Montigny & 40m cube / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and 40m cube
Note: Exhibition booklet is available here
Yoan Sorin’s artistic practice takes the form of paintings applied to a variety of supports, of sculptures composed of various materials, of objects assembled and then painted, and of performances involving his own body. Each element feeds or even contaminates the others in a flowing movement, within installa-tions that constitute three-dimensional compositions constantly renewed by wandering. Inhabited, his exhibitions, in which color is the determining ele-ment, bathe in an atmosphere where serenity coexists with anxiety.
For his exhibition at 40mcube, Chronique de l’oubli, Yoan Sorin creates new works that evoke time and memory. In his production process, which consists in recovering materials, objects and furniture that he combines, transforms and unifies through painting, he employs elements relating to the concept of time, constituting a non-exhaustive inventory of the objects that measure it, the forms that materialize it, and the representations that enable us to find our position in it or to memorize. Watches and clocks, for example, insistently appear in the works, and grids are omnipresent.
The artist plays with these forms as he plays with time and its variations, on a principle of exhaustion. One thing leading to another, he explores duration, periodicity, recurrence, repetition, rhythm, loops and variation.
The exhibition operates as a composition that is temporarily frozen, but which can evolve and be declined in different combinations. Some of the paintings, produced on Corten steel sheets, will record the passing of time by oxidizing, while others, reversible, allow for regular changes during the exhibition. Like a tear-off calendar, one painting replaces another each week, a perpetual calen-dar page is flipped each month, and diaries are exchanged for more abstract paintings.
While all this may seem skilfully constructed and perfectly articulated, the ar-tist introduces disruption at every stage. Small, enigmatic objects, seemingly unrelated to the exhibition register, are added to this homogeneous whole as detournements. A mask, a necklace with a bell, a plastic rat – these are some of the accessories that come into play during the artist’s performances, sug-gesting a new temporality and a different way of inhabiting the space. The watch faces are masked by a layer of paint, and the clocks work without being on time. The calendar gives no indication of month or day, the diary no infor-mation. An upright coffin transformed into a clock functions as a countdown timer, while metronomes simultaneously give two different rhythms that are counterbalanced by an audio track of imperfect human tongue clicks. The heady, hypnotic rhythm of the composition is a form of acceleration that turns into tension. Continuing his path, the artist takes us from obsession to oblivion. Because Yoan Sorin’s exhibition also plays with words, such as «chronicle» in its double meaning, as a chronological narrative and as a symtom that settles in slowly but durably, it testifies a sense of permanent urgency.
-Anne Langlois
