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YO MARCHAND

OR THE BLAZONS OF MEMORY

Yo Marchand's work affirms a very contemporary fascination with archeology, the excavation of sites buried under ancestral silt, a taste for humble materials, and an inclination for ecological testimony. Her identification with nature includes being influenced by arts and crafts techniques, and by the specificity of its approach to pictoriality, as it appeals as much to the eyes as to touch. But, in its integration of other materials into the field of painting it embraces neither radically informalist options nor the questioning of the work by an analysis of its components; nor, as weil, the minimalist axioms or the more critical concepts of the Land Art adepts. There is no attempt here to correct the landscape, no distancing or depersonalization, nothing ephemeral, but a plenary seat of being centered on the very fibers of painting, an adhesion to the exacerbated world which is feverishly dug; where spirituality innerva tes itself in the stones of a scarred and furrowed matter set in layers of sand and dust; which speaks to us of immemorial territories, of enclosed fields suffused with silence, disseminated in the subconscious. And if it designates the erosion of time, ifs effacement and its restitution, so to speak, through the ruggedness and the pigments of emblematic stratifications linked to murality and its cortege of connotations, this writing never spills over into exoticism, esotericism, or socialized declarations.

Born of diffuse memories and of violently-felt sensations, articulated through cycles coherent and unitary in their thematic filiations, such a syntax spells out the chao tic truth of the universe in molding it in the lympy paste of a tense, dramatic language whose intensity governs the worried wandering of the hand, far from effusive overstatement.

We will have understood that this art, even if it nourishes itself on concreteness, cannot be evaluated in terms of representation. Non-imitative, since it submits only to interior requirements, and consequently far removed from the recognizable, it does not transpose, does not proceed through equivalencies. Its reality is based on the reality of painting and the significant materiality of the space it is contained in. Space constructed on telluric fissured stratum, eut with fractures and furrows, by lacerations and blisters, barred by horizontal and vertical lin es, which define conflictual areas full of memory. From these hammered deflagrations, where inertia becomes living substance, under the growth of signs and graffiti inlayed into the density of planes, where shreds of possible worlds become day like geological accidents, and hail to us beyond our gaze to other vertigos.

Such iconography, set in asymmetrical grids inspired by heraldry, sets off a mental drift which solficits the imagination, in mixing the past and the present. Fallow reliefs, undetermined flux, and topographies stir up the prestige of the known and the unknown, in an amalgam of elementary forces which endlessly go back to the origins.

ln raising these chiseled walls, fraught with obscure powers and strewn with corresponding codes, Yo Marchand tells her own story. With a father who was an art cabinetmaker as weil as a painter, she grew up in an environment favorable to the affirmation of her artistic ambitions. First attracted to writing, she turned progressively towards painting, transformed by an irresistable spark as if under the strangehold of some terrible menace. « Painting cured me of fear » she says. « For me it is exorcism, urgency of life. » At sixteen she realized her first figurative paintings, principally portraits. She had a passion for Turner, Van Gogh, Seurat, Braque, before discovering Kandinsky and la ter Alberto Burri, whose itinerary was for her rich with advice. Abandoning, in 1960, any reference to the tangible, she engaged herself in a geometric period, combining circles, arrows, and squares. But judging this practice too dogmatic, following patient periods of self-doubt, she found her vocabulary in 1968, in the celebration of a thankless material, angrily scarred, plowed, decrepit, often chalky, which takes into account - without direct formulationthe great natural rhythms. « l like », she admits, « old cracked walls enriched by time, sculptured vestiges, the rock face of mountains, caves, dolmens, stones ».

ln this way, in her approach, minerals merge with vegetable matter, in other words stone with tree, and also earth with light, notches with imprints, sounds with silence. In a voluntary gesture, tom between pulsations and premeditation, tense relationships are established which translate the marks of derision, the fragility of ail things, the ephemeral and the permanent, anxieties and intoxications. A destructive curve can also be felt, the weight of death, rendered by obsessional images, abrupt but without primitivism, which painting magnifies.

Yo Marchand weaves her architectures in spreading layer after layer on the supports, onto which she adds melanges of powders, ashes, oxides, earth from Provence and Roussillon, to absorb the brilliances. She then plays with the intersections and the antagonisms which she has created, zigzagging them (with a strange burin) with intertwining and crisscrossing stria, and she fringes the surfaces with scars and subsidence, with crevices and scoria, co vers them with halting palpitations revelatory of secret wounds. The colors are scarce, the tones muffled, running away from epidermic seductions.

Determined, independant, this work distills an acrid poetry which entraps time and expresses the inexorable solitude of man.

Gérard Xuriguera

Yo Marchand

Essential signs

ln her studio on the rue Saint-Blaise in Paris, Yo Marchand paints under the watchful eye of several great predecessors whose work she has pinned on the walls. Thus, like many artists, she shows the artists whose inspiration she acknowledges. Braque, of whom Paulhan rightly said that

he was "the patron", and for which she has reasons to admire the rigorous line and poetry accompanied by a taste for rugged materials. Picasso, our century's minotaur, the genius, that force of nature, the man of whom every artist hopes to obtain some of his energy ... Bissière, whose enigmatic style and spiritual engagement are important to her. Modigliani, finally, for the romanticism of the man crazy about painting who threw himself completely into his work.

For almost twenty years, Yo Marchand has been painting in this tiny space overlooking a calm garden in the residential Charonne neighborhood and which hasn't been entirely renovated. She lives completely occupied by her painting, working hard, driven, a fighting spirit. Hypersensitive ... And yet searching in the harmony of a painting full of tenderness and which cultivates symmetry. Ail thisdone with great consistency - the itinerary of a style, her own, which she found early, the paint worked with a knife, rough, striated, but solidly composed. A painting which is involved in a spiritual struggle, the struggle of art which is perhaps the last recourse of a humanity ill with its functionalism, its utilitarianism, its egotisms ... A craftman's painting as weil, in the lineage of a father who was a cabinetmaker, in the affirmation of a work where one does not forget that it is an object that owes as much to the hand as to the mind. However, she had to fight against her family in order to impose her art, aga i nst a mother who d id not know the importance of books and who thought that her daughter was wasting her time reading and painting.

She thus had to revoit first, in the effort of being herself in art, in the movement which led to the great voyage of painting. Having rebelled, Yo Marchand has remained a rebel. She paints, she creates against chaos, in the rage of expression, the violence which refuses to remain silent, which dies if its mouth remains shut. One should not be surprised that, often, her paintings are letters, pages of incredible writings, addressed to who knows who? She borrows from unknown languages, vocabularies she knows nothing of, for the pleasure of the graphies, the drawing of the idioms, without worrying what the phrases actually mean. What is most important is that they are languages, in other words the effort of communicating, signs launched throughout the world. Enigmas beyond translation she could find the meaning of but which she isn't curious enough to look for: a Chinese journal which she knows nothing about, and too bad if someone is surprised in deciphering the excerpt she has put in her painting, using it like a transfer, the simple procedure of the decal. Yo Marchand calls them "impregnations" : a page of a journal (she can just as weil take images in homage to Van Gogh or an evocation of a trip around the world) leave a trace against the background of the painting, a shadow, a veil which is integrated into the paint spread with the knife, in the network of scarifications which she usually marks her surfaces with, animating the material, allowing it to reveal what is underneath the other shades. In this way she imposes sorts of stela on the mysterious inscriptions, on the half-effaced signs, which the spectator should read as such, without knowing, most of the time, which homage they are to, which celebration they invite us to. What is important is that they make one stop and think, incite reverie, awaken memory, invite meditation. They are both objects of delectation and enigmas that cannot be resolved, because they resist any reduction to a formula. They should be taken as the vestiges of another time, like the distant marks of faraway civilizations we have lost the bearings of. Or else as the signs of a common background underlying all cultures ...

I’m looking for the manifestation of man's profound nature, of the possibility of a free and disinterested metaphysical act that seems as lost to me as the images of primitive humanity buried underneath the edifice of culture." Yo Marchand paints to live, to fulfil her role as a human being in the world. Art inyolves the formidable stakes of keeping us as alive as can be, of keeping us connected to the vital forces that palpitate in the world and which the Ancient Ones knew, better than us, how to master.

Rue Saint-Blaise, she voyages without difficulty from one civilization to another, at home in the Orient as in the Merovingien, in solar Persia as in the arcana of the Mahabarata. Wherever our roots can be found, in the permanency of myths, in a timeless human truth whose forgetting would be our loss ... But be careful, this rectangle is a door to another world, a world truer than our modernity, these two triangles are a c1epsydra measuring our future, this abstract form is a sundial ... Nothing here could be derisory and, behind the evident seduction of this carnal and luminous painting, a profound truth is revealed. Because it is with her inner eye that Yo Marchand paints, this vision turned towards the depths of being, and not with the eyes of those who look at the superficiality of the world and who only depict its appearance. For Yo Marchand, what is essential is the important thing.

Gilles Plazy