Download here the Visitor's guide. - Les Ateliers de Rennes

GYAN PANCHAL
Dhrso, 2011. Courtesy of the artist and galery Frank Elbaz, Paris.
Les Prairies's artists
Production
Les Ateliers de Rennes 2012.
Gyan Panchal works like a
geologist, probing the materials
of our everyday environment,
exploring their production cycle and
their origin in order to reveal their
story. He works with raw, mainly
oil-derived industrial materials
such as polymers or plastics
which he combines with natural
powders like graphite and coal. The
forms he creates from industrial
packaging situate his sculpture in
the realm of concrete abstraction.
It is delicate work rooted in organic
and economic history in which the
sedimentation of the materials is not
hidden. For Les Prairies Panchal
created a different sculpture for
each of the two venues of the
collective exhibition. Although they
are autonomous works, the two
sculptures are conceived as two
moments of the same work – two
projections into a space that was to
be filled. The first stands in a 1970s
building in the course of renovation,
a rough predominantly concrete
place, with glass walls giving on
to the outside world. The sculpture
leans against a pillar, hugging the
landscape. There are three sheets of
Styrofoam, curved and covered with
red chalk dust. This is a material
that architects use for their models
and it suits architectonic forms and
the notion of spatial projection. In
the "white cube" exhibition areas
of FRAC Bretagne, Panchal has
designed something different: long,
crumpled isolation sheets hang on
the wall down to the floor, projecting
a layered, undulating relief into the
space. Gyan Panchal's conceptual
and material exploration lightens
the spatial constraints, freeing itself
from gravity
A. B. tr. J.H.
Born in 1973 in Paris (France),
where he lives and works.
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