35-year-old plastic artist, Yoann Ximenes has an atypical but well built career. Graduated in foreign languages, cultural engineering and finally "Contemporary Art and New Media", the artist articulates his work around communication and its formatting. Lecturer at Paris 8 University for 5 years, he is currently a production assistant in the studio of artist CarlosCruz-Diez. Among other things, he won the Yicca Prize in Rome in 2015 and represented France at the Biennale Mediteranea # 18 in Tirana (Albania) in 2017.
Through his poetic research work, based on the observation of the sound phenomenon, he shows what we do not see. Whether it is a political discourse, the voice of a newborn, the birth of the Universe or even the melody of the planets, these sound elements are taken from reality, to be reinvented plastically, they confuse sensory stimuli, interweave the sound and the visual that respond to each other, like an echo of the form.
It is an undeniable fact today that we live on a vibrant planet, in a vibrating universe. Science never ceases to provide proof, of what Hans Jenny (1) explained in the 1960s: "Whenever we look in Nature, animate or inanimate, we see widespread evidence of periodic systems" (2).
From the smallest to the largest scale, things in the universe exist by periodicity, pulsation, oscillation and vibration. It rings in every corner. Sound is therefore everywhere, omnipresent. Sound, an invisible and intangible energy which only exists if there is matter to diffuse and to diffuse it. It is the consequence of a movement of matter which reveals it by diffusing itself. Sound takes shape in matter, and without matter, there is no periodicity, no pulsation, oscillation or vibration; therefore, no sound.
Sound is essential in the artist's artistic approach.
35-year-old plastic artist, Yoann Ximenes has an atypical but well built career. Graduated in foreign languages, cultural engineering and finally "Contemporary Art and New Media", the artist articulates his work around communication and its formatting. Lecturer at Paris 8 University for 5 years, he is currently a production assistant in the studio of artist CarlosCruz-Diez. Among other things, he won the Yicca Prize in Rome in 2015 and represented France at the Biennale Mediteranea # 18 in Tirana (Albania) in 2017.
Through his poetic research work, based on the observation of the sound phenomenon, he shows what we do not see. Whether it is a political discourse, the voice of a newborn, the birth of the Universe or even the melody of the planets, these sound elements are taken from reality, to be reinvented plastically, they confuse sensory stimuli, interweave the sound and the visual that respond to each other, like an echo of the form.
The artist's research explores the energies of sound in the creative process. The motivation of Yoann Ximenes is to use sound as a substrate in order to experiment, probe and develop through artistic creation new modes of representation and deployment of this energy, and its capacity to influence, move and sometimes transform things in the world. Since the definition of of "performativity" was coined, we know that language has the power to intervene in the course of reality in order to modify it. Speech is no longer just a means of describing reality, a way of accounting for things and events, like a discursive mirror of the world.In the performative, language loses its neutrality and, by the same token, its alleged will to disentangle the true from the false.
The artist notably explores the political issue of the "power of words", a remarkable tool aimed at making the world perform.His artistic activity is a physical extension of work related to language.His approach studies the staging of sound and vocal elements in sculptural forms and geometric graphic lines. His creation is the result of research consisting in using vibrations, rhythms and sounds as a substrate in order to give substance to his body of work. This approach aims to study the relationship of influence between the worlds of sound and matter. How does the sound universe shape the physical world and influence our apprehension of reality?
(1) Hans Jenny was a Swiss physicist and naturalist who coined the term Cymatics to describe the acoustic effects of sound wave phenomena.
(2) In Hans Jenny, Cymatics: A Study of Wave Phenomena and Vibration, éd. Macromedia, 2007, p.15