Yann Gerstberger

L'Almanach 18 : Yann Gertsberger

This young French painter living in Mexico could not be unaware of the glorious muralist pair, Diego Riviera and Frida Kahlo. Color, pre-Colombian mythologies, tropicalized modernism, Indian weavers, everything is here to encourage the active assimilation of this data into hybridized works, a little wild, well-nourished by the clever abstractions of the 1930s.
A collage of fibers into fake shimmering tapestries with cochineal dyes and pure batiked chemistries. Quetzalcoatl feathered snake, lyrebird, bestiary of nothing, drawn with the braids of a mop plunged into dye baths and patiently stuck onto a recycled vinyl tarp. Yann Gerstberger has recently started combining them with frescoes created from school chalk on walls prepared with rough cement mortar, offering decorative abstract backgrounds.
Jill Gasparina writes: “Yann Gerstberger belongs to the generation of artists for whom traveling to Mexico or strolling through Google images is (almost) the same thing. The reference does not matter, the images do not have captions. All that matters is the encounter with the image and the libidinal energy it generates, desire, fascination, rejection, or indifference. Today it is necessary to seriously think about this new kind of visual surrealism, arising from the conditions of objective chance created by the Web 2.0. What does it mean to encounter an image about which we know nothing? Do we have a responsibility in front of images? By way of response, he pushes to the maximum limit the magical and eccentric side of his pieces and explains that he ‘simply tries to make a hallucinatory piece, with an internal psychology, and that we can look at without having the codes to interpret it.’ Then he compares the experience offered by his sculptures with that which consists of looking at a sculpture from Papua New Guinea at Quai Branly, without reading its caption: Yann Gerstberger is on to something, because there is indeed a connection between the circulation of images which dissolve in their own mass and exoticism, pure fantasy, which is always revealed to be a little inconsistent.”
What is this new cobbled together hybridization, woven from Mexican, Berlin, or Istanbul urban subcultures, if not the cliché of young people full of conceit about being born connected and, as a result, in a permanent state of composting and unrepentant accumulation. The practice of little savages spraying the studio walls with FNLC Canal-Historique (National Liberation Front of Corsica) graffiti accompanied by images of the valiant Abstraction-Création members, Auguste Herbin, Jean Hélion, and Georges Vantongerloo, who, in 1931, founded this group and eponymous review for a biomorphic and non-authoritarian abstract art, would give us a hard time and easy pleasure. For L’Almanach 18, Yann Gerstberger presents new “tapestries” and a wall decorated with chalk.
— Franck Gautherot