The Xippas Gallery is happy to present Yvan Salomone’s third solo exhibition. The exhibition features an ensemble of thirty-five watercolors made during the last three years.
“Eclipse… Dream: two shipping boxes, dead without their pairs of shoes. Dream: large black spots printed and placed on a bed guarded by a small barking white dog. Dream: on the stage, behind their instruments, Sigmund Freud, Marcel Broodthaers, Henri Rousseau, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec search for harmony. Dream: unending stage changes. Dream: clear dissolution of logic – four hiding two – epistemic, clinical, political, and poetic… Evaporated time swirls around an invisible axis in these night pool and paints a thick mystery, which submerges me – like the blind apnea divers, I slowly make the movements of the breast stroke…I don’t possess any other methods to try and sense different qualities, the depth, or the constraining viscosity. To catch my breath and shore up my reserve, I place in front of me that which I don’t completely draw: a group of boxes on stilts originally covered with monstrous and pathetic logos; they are dressed and scraped of militant objects. I rub, I erase, and I withdraw from this world of brutal signs. Expulsed hermit? Printed differently, not retracing them I advance towards six continents on legs, speechless… now resplendent in their refusal to be informed: lakeside civilization. Their skin shines free of tattoos! Calmness can unfold! Often I speak of echoes, but today it is of stilts: their rejections place that one… diffuse and moving. The suspended group plunges their stakes into the material of metaphoric glue: polluted sea, tape. In the reality of perspective, the approach, the surface on which the ensemble rests is only an ordinary street scene, maybe more probable. Here I nurse my retreat that offers speechlessness as a declaration: my silence is that of tomorrow! Project of secluded and vigilant patterns… Reflections and rejections mingle here where the image, once again, finds diversion in its ellipsis.”
Yvan Salomone was born in 1957 at Saint-Malo where he lives and works.
Salomone paints watercolors in his studio based on preliminary photographs taken from the four corners of the planet. He doesn’t reproduce the photos in his works, but liberally interprets them; the photos are a visual starting point. Thus the representation of raw materials (containers, cement, steel, etc.) conflict with the lightness of the watercolors and undergo a metamorphosis to create the singular nature of his compositions. The massive lines of a container ship or the rusty cylinders of heavy barrels allow him the opportunity not only to free the energy inside these massive objects, but also to give them a voice, without relieving them of their functions. Yvan Salomone shows what speaks, but purifies it, synthesizes it, and transforms it – he leaves the meaning ambiguous, allusive, and open. Yvan Salomone’s landscapes defend reality as well as a poetic dematerialization of it, and impose a perspective to the public as well as a space in suspension.
Yvan Salomone’s work was exhibited at several European institutions such as the Mnam – Centre Pompidou, Mac Val, Cité de l’architecture, Musée d’art moderne et contemporain de Strasbourg, La Criée – Centre d’art contemporain (Rennes), Mamco (Geneva), Witte de With (Rotterdam), Musée de la Chaux-de-Fonds (Switzerland), and FRAC, to name a few.
His work are part of many public and private collections including, MNAM Centre Pompidou, FMAC, Mac Val, FRAC Bretagne, Haute Normandie, PACA, Picardie, Limousin, Poitou-Charentes, Île-de-France, Auvergne, Pays de la Loire, Languedoc-Rousillon, Fonds Municipal de la Ville de Paris, Collection Société Générale, MAMCO, Museu Coleçao Berardo (Lisbon), and Witte de With (Rotterdam).
Évaporations, the sequel to Zoneblanche, is currently being printed and will be available at the end of 2016 at Editions de Mamco.
