The Palimpsest

Intro

The Medium

Time

The observation

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Palimpsest : A manuscript on Parchment, or the like, from which writing has been partially or completely erased to make room for another text.
Mixed technics : veneers "strata", glued by vacuum pressing, then sand-blasted.


Palimpsest : Après-midi d'un Faune
The Palimpsest is literally a manuscript which has been "scraped again", from the Greek Palin "once again", and psaein "scrape".

By definition, the Palimpsest is not an immediate creation, and reading them is not done instantaneously: it is at a crossroad between nature and culture, dream and creation, imagination and geometry, reality and ideality.

It is a concrete lesson in profoundness, which translates a demanding need to go to the heart of things, to not only imagine shape and colors, but also the elementary virtues of the medium, inscribed in a long history and provoked in its intimacy.

Yann Hervis escavates space and time:he awakens a subtle dialect from the depths; our eyes stop first on the surface,on a fabric,on a weft, then it ventures deeper, exploring forms, plains and perspectives, dislodging pieces of forgotten history, fragments of memories asleep in the wood. One approaches the piece, steps back, looks at the entirety then at a detail, one focuses, one attempts to dominate the work, then one loses ones self. The eye is sharpened, acquiring an acuteness at scrutinizing at length these wooden incunabula. Then one dreams of Baudelaire and Thomas de Quincy for whom "The memory is only an immense and complicated Palimpsest"...


Trogne : Minuit vint...
The Palimpsest inspires reflection as well as reverie; it provokes a meditation which is active, dynamic and abounds.
  INTRODUCTION • THE MEDIUMTIMETHE OBSERVATION