Yvan Salomone — À propos — Slash Paris

Yvan Salomone was born in 1957 in Saint-Malo (France) where he lives and works.

He studied Artwork in Rennes II University, then creates large panoramas of Judean bitumen of industrial-port landscapes. That serie made him famous, including his first solo exhibition at the art center La Criée in Rennes in 1992.

When, on the 5th of August 1991, Salomone decides to paint in watercolor the port he sees everyday, he met two challenges. Transmute a common place into a singular landscape and update an outdated technique. A specific program was subsequently imposed on itself:

•  One watercolor on paper every week
•  Every of them from a photograph taken (Saint-Malo, Shanghaï, Rotterdam)
•  Every watercolor on paper has the same size, 105 cm x 145 cm
•  No human being, nor lively movements in the image

However, the painter opened to new places, such as wasteland or urban construction sites, as for the commissions placed on the artist on the occasion of the extension of Line 3 of the tramway in eastern Paris or the construction of the new Frac Bretagne inaugurated in Rennes in 2012.

Before painting, Yvan Salomone composed a serie a series of paintings in a very elongated format (like the cinemascope). Made with Judean bitumen, dark matter and photosensitive, these works propose in a quasi-exclusive way industrial landscapes whose identity is pending and whose man is physically absent even if he is the sole responsible for the silent spectacle that the artist portrays.

« My works are comparable to hiatus, the moment when the director asks the actors to leave the stage to make way for the set. In this way, spectators can enter the work more easily. » ¹

Yvan Salomone

His work was exhibited at numerous European institutions such as Centre Pompidou (Paris), Mac Val (Musée d’art contemporain du Val de Marne), Cité de l’architecture (Paris), Musée d’art moderne et contemporain de Strasbourg, La Criée — Centre d’art contemporain (Rennes), Mamco (Geneva), Witte de With (Rotterdam), Musée de la Chaux-de-Fonds (Switzerland), FRAC…

In 2018, the FRAC Bretagne (Rennes) dedicated a large personnal exhibition to his work Déluge et retrait, featuring more than 170 watercolours, accompanied by the book of the same title.

The Mamco in Geneva edited a series of books dedicated to Yvan Salomone’s work. The book Zoneblanche brings together the watercolours realised between 1996 and 2006, and the book Le point d’Ithaque, published in 2010, features the texts by Yvan Salomone corresponding to each watercolour from the same period. The catalogue Évaporations includes the works from 2006 to 2016.

Yvan Salomone’s works are part of many public and private collections including Centre Pompidou, FMAC, Mac Val (Musée d’art contemporain du Val de Marne), les FRAC Bretagne, Haute Normandie, PACA, Picardie, Limousin, Poitou-Charentes, Île-de-France, Auvergne, Pays de la Loire, Languedoc-Roussillon, Fonds Municipal de la Ville de Paris, Collection Société Générale, MAMCO (Geneva), Museu Colecçao Berardo (Lisbon), Witte de With (Rotterdam).

¹ « Mes œuvres sont comparables à des hiatus, ce moment où le metteur en scène demande aux comédiens de quitter la scène pour laisser place au décor. Ainsi les spectateurs peuvent rentrer dans l’œuvre plus facilement. »