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

68
Les Prairies's artists
YANN SéRANDOUR
Un cours d’eau paresseux à travers les prairies, 2012. Courtesy of the artist and galery gb agency, Paris.
Photography : Yann Sérandour.
Yann Sérandour's work has evolved within the world of books and bookshops. He has
produced a number of pieces in which he has extended or given a twist to the emblematic
works of conceptual artists from art history who have used books, texts or printed matter.
He has adopted indexing, listing and reproduction processes and applied them to the very
people who were the first to use them. Through quotation and appropriation, his referential
art plays on the meanings of signs, offering reinterpretations, even totally new stories, of art
and its history. A lazy stream flowing through the prairies would be the translation (slightly
adapted for the Rennes Biennale 2012) of the Japanese paper-marbling technique called
Suminagashi. Drops of different coloured inks are dripped using a paintbrush into a tray of
clear water so that they float in concentric rings which the artist then disturbs with a feather.
When a design is ready, the artist places a sheet of paper on the surface of the water and
it picks up the imprint of the suspended pattern. In an installation consisting of a series of
eight stainless steel trays, Sérandour revisits the technique of this ephemeral art form in
which attention to the expression of natural forces overrides any controlling intention the
artist may have. The formats and the positioning of the trays in this installation map the
layout of the display cabinets in the Cabinet du Livre d’Artiste – the exhibition venue for this
joint project in which Yann Sérandour is aided and abetted by Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc
and Pierre Leguillon.
A. B. tr. J.H.
Born in 1974 in Vannes (France), lives and works around Rennes
and Paris (France).
Production
Les Ateliers de Rennes 2012.