YANN GERSTBERGER

During the past decade, Yann Gerstberger (born in Cagnes sur Mer, France, 1983) has created a body of work in which uncontinuous, innocent, tropical and primitive motifs constitute a visual vocabulary mixed between the representational and abstract. Rugged and colourful, the tapestries are a sublime amalgamation of the extensive archive of imagery culled by the artist from many sources, including the Internet, in an effort to engage the material world with its imaginary counterpart. Rendered in hand-dyed mop yarns, the materiality of the image surface becomes soft as a result of the process, echoing the digital nature of the original image–as if blurry from pixilation. Although the works are clearly legible from afar or from a photograph, upon close inspection, the textural qualities of the tapestries interfere with the image’s communicative ability in reality.

Gerstberger’s anthropomorphic sculptures mix multi-source elements and readily available objects from Mexico City’s markets to create personified figures of the same characters working in the markets themselves. Bearing some form of cultural hybridisation where traditional techniques and motifs intersect with mass-consumption objects, his work is characterised by a profusion of exuberant colours and shapes. Gerstberger’s style blurs the boundaries by connecting imaginations and worlds, gradually achieving the transformation of one image into another. His visual language is a mostly vernacular one, referencing the comic Fábulas Pánicas, by the Chilean-French artist Alejandro Jodorowsky, and the European fantasy of the tropical, but it also draws from and continues the modernist tradition of his native France.