Suddenly, a blinding light. Shapes appear, move and waltz, lifted by an invisible breeze. It’s all about suppleness, angles, textures and colors. By looking closely, fragments reveal themselves: they are hair, trees, legs, architectures, blades of grass…. YOON Ji Eun’s latest works tell the story of a world admittedly cracked and floating, but a world that is also stratified, organic and cyclic. In a movement from inwards to outwards, the artist seizes images of division, separation, reshaping or even dispersion. She describes how she sometimes lets herself daydream and feels projected into space. A couple of brief instants, airy and miniscule, she is almost weightless and comes close to void and light.

Confronted with a world in transition, a reality that she cannot grasp, YOON Ji-Eun chooses to take some perspective and reacts by means of figures and shapes decomposing and immaterializing. Bi and tri-dimensionalities are not the only ones cohabitating in her drawings on papers and sculpted woods. The artist activates yet another dimension, which is both temporality and musicality. If certain compositions strike in their verticality, others are multi-focal for everything to appear undulating, shapeshifting, moving. Light and void thus create a world of possibilities. The world can transform and rise again. Grace, utopia and nothingness engage closely with each other.

Notions of travels and temporality have been at the chore of YOON Ji Eun’s work for a long time. Scenes from dreams were embedded in everyday life moments, interiors, landscapes. In 2019, antique statues were part of contemporary environments (metro stations, urban architectures, rifts in the landscape), giving life to one of her fundamental concerns, our complex relation to time and reality. YOON Ji Eun felt such a presence, such life in these sculptures and thousand-year-old expressions that a bridge between these far-apart times had been built. In 2020, a residency at the Institut Français in Saint-Louis, Senegal, deeply influenced the artist. She came back struck by the discovery of a societal reality so different from what she knew, marked by the colonial past, lights and nuances she had never considered. Numerous drawings and a praxinoscope were born from this encounter under the sign of synchronicity and erosion of time. From now on, another color, a fluidity and a blur have made their way into YOO Ji-Eun’s work.

Travelling towards the unfinished marks a new chapter. YOON Ji-Eun gives space to turbulence, fragments, glimpses. The world is no longer a static and unalterable frame where one circulates in an almost cyclic manner. The world is instability, mutation, conversion and made of strata that materialize a continuity. Thus, certain drawings unveil horizontal stripes entirely covering the paper. Between these stripes, brightness pierces through, like vision between shutters. Fragile points travel across these spaces in a regular rhythm, specimen, mini-worlds and markers minutely depicted.

Elsewhere, the tunnel is a metaphor for a fractioned and split vision. Obscurity, this visual void experienced through a passage in a tunnel materializes as planes of white alternating with planes of fluid colors. Entire sheets are covered by distinct fragments.

Wood reliefs are another proposition. The medium’s discrete veins recall its organic nature. Areas with multiples colors can be read, contrasting with those drawn with a simple pencil. Vertical shapes are erected, planted like incisions in the composition’s fluidity. Their tridimensionality is even more reinforced by the raw work of the knife and gouge that suggest a pending brutality. In some places, mini-shapes of color explode, bringing a breath, a wind, a sound…

With this new ensemble of works, YOON Ji-Eun makes the promise of a poetic journey in the realms of doubt and the indefinite, and in fine, allows us to embrace a certain relinquishment in favor of a permanent potential.

His works were inspired by Conrad Gessner’s Historia Animalium (1551-1558). Vermont replaced the 16^th century academic « drawings-engravings » by his own, but he kept  the original captions.

The Swiss naturalist is considered by many as the first modern zoologist. In this  History of animals, a vast work of 3.500 pages, each species is thoroughly described with the addition of  their use made by poets and philosophers.

Vermont’s drawings tend to overtake Gessner’s legacy, almost dynamite it. After his graduation, he isolated himself for several months. During this time which he calls his « unlearning period » he tried to rediscover the naivety and yet narrative efficiency of children’s drawings. His bestiary is authentic and subversive, in conflict with Gessner’s academic strictness. We are touched by these funny, lively, burlesque drawings.

With coloured pencils, pens and pastels, he offers the animals a second life. As the curator Julie Crenn wrote, he produces  « an intense and disarming expressiveness ». This artist is extremely skilful, his stroke is altogether wild and precise, his colours exhilarating. The words or expressions he adds are humoristic comments to Gessner’s captions.

This exhibition is supported by the Centre national des arts plastiques

(Subsidy for a first solo exhibition)