Superimposed universes, different in kind: such, one would like to say, is the vision of Alain Le Yaouanc. One of these worlds is made up of recognisable elements, taken from everyday reality, which the painting jostles a little, not without an almost tender nostalgia. There figures gather, met in the street, or more exactly in the streets of novels, long ago and not so long ago. Between them slip trees, green spaces, clouds, fragments of buildings. That world is habitable; or, at a pinch, it could be so in an impossible elsewhere onto which they are projected. The real serves to mock the real: it would be no more than atrociously acceptable were it to impose itself. It has to be disjointed; and, first of all, peopled with exceptional beings. Alain Le Yaouanc’s spaces are thus peopled with heroes who struggle at once against the forces of hell and against the slumbers of paradise; figures stepped out of some Italian Renaissance thrash about there, and in the end vanquish not the spirit of evil or of good but, more scandalously, abstract ideas embodied in rectangles, cubes and lines, mingled like so many further characters with those we know to be of flesh. So a cosmos of abstractions invades the domain of man, and vies with him: athlete against pyramid, demigod against isosceles, slave against parallels, frightened citizen against trapezium. What lives and what is pure form have the same moral, or sensory, value. The universe of forms and the universe of beings seek to interpenetrate in rich and terrible nuptials, so that the beings are left as if disembodied, and the geometric forms acquire there something like a soul, or a suffering. One must live there on good terms with the circle, as though it breathed, and with the square as though it were a somewhat cumbersome elder brother. On the three-dimensional plane, that of objects, this may be rendered thus: the plaster head of a pretty woman is shattered by an ostentatious cone that does duty for her face, between the eyebrow and the lips. Where do these espousals against nature take place? Most often it is beyond the limits of the palpable, somewhere where adventure meets the rarefied air, the stratosphere, far from the earth, far from the normal eye. In this daylight from beyond the days, and in this sidereal night, beings and forms become symbols. Little by little, body and numeral merge there into the same matter, or the same absence of matter. So far out, nothing is strange any longer. To obtain this impression of disorientation, of mystery and at the same time of derision, the means are varied. Some remain classical, or very nearly. The oils are few in number, as though Alain Le Yaouanc were holding himself in reserve for that exacting and grave form of art. He has completed a few; they haunt him, and he has still not dared return to them. He knows that one day he will paint others, once he has made trial of the new methods, which he multiplies daily. Less rare are the drawings, which are of two kinds: the compositions with figures, which seem illustrations of monumental dreams, in which elements and figures make their way towards an epic destiny of continual metamorphoses, without respite or pardon; and also the aerial architectures, as it were the crossroads of several vertiginous spaces, where vertigo itself would become geometric law, in a great breathing of lines and surfaces in perpetuated flight. From drawing to gouache the passage is imperceptible; colour then becomes essential and dispenses with specious charms. A strict economy never plays at setting needless traps. The objects are shatterings of objects: a poet’s rage must at every moment give the lie to their use, henceforth unacceptable. What was once utensil, or mere white copy of the real, turns against its enslavement and mocks reality. As in the days of Dada, the thing is the opposite of what it claims to be; yet the spirit is new, if one compares it with that of 1917 or 1922, a time when what mattered above all was to preach the scuttling of convention. Today it is as though each object held a secret, senseless yet disquieting, and it fell to the artist to unveil it... or at least to give the feeling that it might let itself be grasped. Between the derisory and the fabulous, corridors, passages, labyrinths are contrived, in an atmosphere of rigour yet of mystery. Somewhere, in a country not yet discovered, objects arrived at in this way are commonplace; of that there can be no doubt, for they impose themselves, strange, peremptory, almost dictatorial. The only question that arises – and it is paramount – is how to gain entry to that country, resolutely unfindable. Alain Le Yaouanc’s predilection – one is tempted to say: the form of creation that comes to him most easily, as though repeating it five or six times a day cost him no effort – is for curious collages, of which he has long since been a master. In a first phase he chooses his material: old engravings from which he cuts out a figure, or an elegant object, details from catalogues, alphabets either baroque or classical, sundry materials often of cardboard or wood, if not of celluloid, geometric motifs too. To this first selection he adds freer forms that recall, for instance, plant life, some found in books or illustrated papers, some that he has painted himself before cutting them out. These disparate elements he groups, mingles, makes interpenetrate, sometimes with an apparent order, sometimes as if guided by the intoxication of chance. When his intuition tells him to bring the stirring to an end and the result obtained satisfies him, he pins up the components and leaves them to merge into a single landscape, on the wall. A little time is enough for corrections, substitutions, subtractions. This is the second phase: the selection arrived at must impose itself on the eye and on the reasoning faculties, which never wish to eliminate surprise or the absurd. The third phase is purely technical: the pins are replaced by the gluing proper, with a hint of relief obtained by a light padding. Until a few months ago this was the usual procedure, technically speaking. Since then it has changed appreciably, in the direction of an enrichment now ceaselessly renewed. The collages first served, as if by transparency, for frottages: a strange landscape would be covered with a kind of glaze, or of substance which, thanks to pencil or charcoal, seemed the translation of a reality caught through a mist. Later the collages were photographed, so that their components fused into a single substance, at one remove. The chain could not stop. From the frottages it was possible to arrive at new elements, which were cut out of them; photographs were cut up in the same way. These cut-outs, in their turn, yielded the elements of a future collage, made up, in short, as much of new details as of details taken from the frottage or the photograph obtained on the basis of earlier collages. The formula, one sees, is practically inexhaustible. Technique, of course, is in the service of a conception of the world – unconscious or conscious, no matter: one, let us say, that must at every moment surprise the man it inhabits – before which it effaces itself. Of that world, with its mysterious expanses taken from a real deliberately either atrophied or led astray, with its abstract elements that have a carnal and pitiless presence, its scripts that seem not to recognise what they were originally meant for, with its cosmic gravitations too, within a strict economy, Alain Le Yaouanc is today the inspired steward. One senses him in possession of a thousand possibilities of a professional order: he knows that the essential thing is to go beyond them by means, precisely, of an inalienable conception in which the certainties and virtuosities of the craftsman serve a philosophy of mystery.
Alain Bosquet