There is a temporality which is specific to palimpsests. Upon this materializes a
singular geometry of time - made up of disorganized sedimentation, successive deposits
coming from memory and true-life experiences, but also of renewals, returns and recurrences.
Palimpsest : Eclipse en pays de Caux
"Time" is no longer inevitably fading away, an irreversible linear process which leads
to entropy. "Time" no longer unfolds: it turns back, settles down, reconstructs itself,
magnifies itself; it transcends and poeticizes itself. The "Palimpsest's " artist
imagines himself philosopher of the eternal return, of the reversibility and the primitiveness
of the world. He imagines himself an archeologist finding lost yesterdays or releasing
vestiges from alluviums of time.
He imagines himself an epigrapher uncovering inscriptions which, as a result of their
resurgence, have become reinscriptions. He imagines he is a gold panner gathering
nuggets, searching not the earth, but the wood, searching for gold in the form of
memories... Perhaps he even imagines himself a wizard applying pressure to underground
sources and inducing them to flow forth.
Palimpsest : Arbre sur la Loire & données GPS
But undoubtedly Yann Hervis imagines himself, above all else, an alchemist. He recognizes
the profound sense of metamorphosis. His work is like the alchemist's "Grand Oeuvre":
the medium veiled and unveiled, covered and uncovered, acquiring a Sense: the slats
of wood lose their opacity, becoming lace and filigree. The vegetable matter once
stripped, smoothed, polished and labored over, almost becomes a mineral: fossilized
wood, gypsum flower, driftwood... Certain essences take on an ethereal delicacy, like
a damascening in wood, while others, denser, are the opposite.
So the palimpsest rises to its statute of Art Object; a singular art which goes beyond
surfaces and is inscribed in an alchemy of the deep. |
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