Something spellbinding in this name. A name that carries one abroad: Le Yaouanc. Like a substance burst apart. Musical and unpronounceable. It takes two attempts. A name to be given over to chance. Shout it, then wait... Listen for the form in which the echo will give it back to us. Note that a certain resemblance arises between this unreasonable attempt and the approach of a painter characterised by a stubborn invention of which nothing can be foreseen, neither the order nor the chaos. It is difficult to describe the gesture that leads him to the painted thing. But whether it be a matter of dislocating or of building, of scattering or of gathering, of assembling minute fragments (collage) or of bringing us into a world where everything is beyond all measure (giant canvas), this gesture leaves nothing to chance. (Let us say, to be more precise, that it stands at the opposite pole from the “dripping” of a Pollock.) Trusting like the gesture of the sower, cruel like that of the entomologist who, pins in hand, arranges his torture boards, anxious – but how controlled – like that of the gambler gathering up his dice before trying one last chance, whatever it may be, it is felt by whoever observes it as the gesture of a man alone, pursuing a dream. Thus imaginary spaces are created. Often life has withdrawn from them. Such is Le Yaouanc’s latest manner: spaces subjected to cosmic assaults, uncertain and enigmatic landscapes, necropolises laid open to the winds, the vertical fall of singular objects, frozen stratifications, explosions, receding sheets that streak the sky, illimitable habitacles.
For a long time I thought him foreign. A pardonable mistake, born of the mental disorientation his name provokes; that was before I knew him. But although his nationality is henceforth known to me – one could not be more French: Breton father, Norman mother – even now I imagine him coming from a region that has no precise place on this earth of ours. No one will ever rid me of the idea that Le Yaouanc is a word that could be pronounced, stressed, given rhythm until it took on another sound, and written out in hands so various that there would be nothing surprising, at the chance of some port of call, in finding it, with a new meaning, designating a place of wonders and of melancholy. Le Yaouanc... It is the name of a money-changer bent over a heap of unknown coins, the name of a vagabond or of a kleptomaniac, the name of a magician raising in the sky, with an inexhaustible wealth of invention, architectural caprices whose rigour is a marvel. Do understand me: what I mean is that it is no accident that this tireless builder – one would be tempted to say this buildomaniac – should have a name of adventure: Le Yaouanc.
I imagined him bearing witness in his whole person to a mathematical mind, walking with measured steps, his hair well behaved. Yet he has the legs of a wading bird, the hair of Werther, and what is more he does not walk, he floats. Let us fix our attention on a studied manner of dress that is at first sight suspect. Were his aim not to please but to be noticed, one would condemn him without appeal. Most fortunately there is nothing in common between the undeniable care for dress that Le Yaouanc displays and the exhibitionism of certain buffoons of the Parisian art world. Moustaches curled into hooks, canes with pommels, Merovingian thrones... Let us leave these puppets their playthings. Their concern for publicity is plain. So let us not name them. What in them is calculation is, in Le Yaouanc, secession. Deep within him something delights in banishing the image of the bourgeoisie from which he springs. Thus, in his ear, a gold ring is the no with which he answers the prohibitions that bound his ancestors hand and foot. His outfits – fatigues for working but also, for going out, this madness for black that seizes him – impossible to regard them as anything other than a beginning again. Picasso’s zinc-worker’s overalls, in the first days of the Bateau-Lavoir... In the bistros of Chatou, Vlaminck and Derain affecting “the English style” (Chaliapin, who had his clothes made in London, passed his cast-offs on to them)... If young men, in order to live, need to feel themselves other, then, after all, that is up to them.
I have as yet said nothing of the circumstances of his birth. Le Yaouanc came into the world in a time of apocalypse. He was born at Alençon on 18 May 1940, in the sadness of unclosed houses. Elsewhere, it was the migration of civilians, and evenings of an immense sweetness. One imagines the first journey of the child whose mother carried him off in a work-basket and, just like that, all the way to Normandy. Nothing in his life that is not strange. At sixteen, he belonged to that dramatic youth which, in New York, lived to the very limit of its strength; at twenty, he watched Algeria burn.
It may be that Le Yaouanc feigns to call painting what is in truth the unconscious transposition of the outbreaks of fury he has witnessed. This world in fragments he rebuilds after his own fashion, and when materials fail him he manufactures them out of ruins. He then knows the vertigo of the breakers of images: to blind a statue, to take a palace away from its pediment, to behead a monument, to scatter on the blast of a revolution the capitals of a colonnade. O youth of the iconoclasts! And this solitude of a flayed man...
Edmonde Charles-Roux June 1975