Anne-Charlotte Yver — À propos — Slash Paris

Anne-Charlotte Yver’s sculptural project is infinite; shaped by successive adjustments, it is grounded in a melancholic presentiment of the futility of all attempts at construction. A gut feeling her works adapt to when they discover in their precariousness some possible refashioning. She comes to grips, experimentally, with materials like concrete, latex, acid, grease and electrical wiring. Drawing equally on manual adeptness and poetic intuition, she appropriates both the usage and the symbolism of these resources, bringing skilled handling and amalgamation to bear on gradually developing a personal structure for them. A structure that reveals contradictory influences and delineates the metaphor of a body, with its moods, its fragility, its subjection to time and decay. The combination of elements gives rise to destructive processes — sun damage, breakup, erosion — as organic and solid matter abut and the geological and the liquid blend. Reinforced with steel skeletons or plexiglas tubing, these structures obey a modular principle; each sculpture can thus be rearranged from one exhibition to another, modifying its relationship with ambient space or coping with logistical constraints. Anne-Charlotte Yver’s engineering approach is far from merely technical: she heightens the potential of her material and bodily capacities, using repeated modification to exploit matter’s instability and test it to its physical and imaginative limits. A joyful annihilation that comes with its share of emulation. Such an undertaking, by being persistently brought to its climax and beyond, comes to terms with melancholy ’s undermining process.

Antoine Camenen for L’ahah, 2019.
(translation by John Tittensor)