48, avenue Sergent Maginot
35000 Rennes

For Stranger by Green , his first monographic exhibition produced by 40mcube, Yann Gerstberger built a series of sculptures composed of statuettes standing on hybrid and baroque assemblages made up of different materials such as leather scraps, bamboos, Plexiglas, artificial flowers, cellophane and industrial objects like a bodybuilding bench, a beach umbrella or a concrete plinth.

Yann Gerstberger ’s sculptures seem to be the objects of modern rituals. Colourful, ornamented, they gather disparate objects with a past life such as Western everyday objects, mass-produced objects of so called primitive art and materials as diverse as fabrics, tarpaulin and reused wood… Those elements are tied up, erected and partially covered up with fabrics or painted ethnical motifs, reinterpreted in sculptures that accept their decorative and artisanal aspect.

By assembling in this manner, the artist creates an overbidding, his sculptures compile the meaning of each object and of the one created by the assemblage itself. He plays with surfaces and volumes and seems to be applying to sculpture the mixing of images, the copy and pasting present in computing.

His work method uses the research of objects, of materials, of images, with direct compositions, and not using sketches, notes or simulations beforehand, reminding us of serendipity, the discovery that results of luck. If this has become a proper scientific method, it has been used for a long time, and still is today by artists like Yann Gerstberger. Close to experimentation, the method is conveyed in his work with a ritual sculpture. Each of his pieces, on which he does not give any indication on the provenance of their component, is in itself a discovery and a curiosity.

The artist claims a “direct filiation with art brut, naïve, primitive, and a non-Western heritage, tribal, ethnic, mixing, with geographic and mental movements.” His sources of inspiration and his references are multiple but carefully chosen, from African primitivisms, pre-Columbian, Oceanian to “outsider” cultures, popular, urban, street, and surf culture that can be found in Californian culture. The questions of post-colonialism and low cultures are implied without taking position, through the prism of a very personal exotism.

Photo: Patrice Goasduff