Yo-Yo Gonthier's art is freely inspired by the exploration in general: quests, discoveries and travels that are as much concrete as they are fantasised. By means of film, drawing, engraving, photography and performance, he invites us to a historical reading of forms and universal matters.
Through both actions and symbols, forms lead to the rethinking of the dreaming state here and now, within its repetition or experience in different geographical sites. Yo-Yo Gonthier is a composer of lines, senses and sounds: the materiality of his works results from those. A paper print appears from an engraved object, as if it were photographed or pinned. Reproducibility testifies to a return to the essence of forms.
‘‘It is the emergence of the wonderful in question here, shrouded in its viscerally anguished journey, existential and metaphysical. It is the notion of commitment in question here, from the vertiginous momentum of the rst step to the collective gesture, constructive and fundamental. It is freedom of imagination in question here. It is your daring and loving gaze in question here. It is your world and mine in question here, may the stay mingled here forever.’’
Yo-Yo Gonthier about his work Une éclaircie, le rêve d’une acrobate
"In Yo-Yo Gonthier's work, the poetry and the politics, the magic and the manifest are intertwined. The formal tensions intensified by the conflict between stability and movement, between bright and obscure spaces, act as the nerves of the dialectical forces proper to the history of humanity. His photographs invite us to contemplation and personal journey: to get lost in the drawing to engage oneself in the search for meaning. From the concrete visible chimaeras emerge, here entangled in the immemorial struggle between bestiality and civilisation."
Extract from the article by Marc Aufraise for Art Press, n°460
On the occasion of Paris Photo, November 2018
Image : Des ânes et des lions, Bamako, Mali, 2007