Gyan Panchal
Gyan Panchal, allows himself to recycle rejected materials - the polystyrene that produces our lives as consumers, born from the industrial transformations and operations of the fossil fuels that powered our modern comfort, our transient prosperity, and the wars of the past century (...). These are materials and forms that he does not conflate, but rather adjoins. The process appeals to him, disconcerts him, intrigues him, amuses him, connects him to surrounding worlds and beings. He allows himself to develop a - benevolent - interest in them, in the Benjaminian tradition of the "aura"; he does not reduce them to their utility, to their functional value, to what they were originally intended for, but instead preserves the outline of their genealogy, their substance; he does not reduce them to a "trait of insignificance": he gives them a place, makes room for them in his attention, in his gestures, in the studio, in his voice and - later - in the exhibition space; little by little, he creates the conditions for them to transfer from one form to another, or to other recomposed forms, to other fixities or other fluidities, to other cohabitations devoid of mergers or hybridisations; it is a "broadening" of life, of presences, of the occupation or unfurling of space, of contacts. Sculpture, perhaps after it has claimed this initial death of things for itself, after it has become emancipated from the noxious chemistry of its materials, is similar to the poem, which, as Jean-Christophe Bailly describes it, "if considered in all of its plenitude, exceeds the mere question of its genre and broadens out, spreads out beyond itself, and recovers its memory."
[Source: Marjorie Micucci, "Here Begins a New Life" in Gyan Panchal: Au seuil de soi, monographic publication, ed. Snoeck + MAMC+ Saint-Etienne, 2019]
Gyan Panchal was born in 1973, he lives in Faux-la-Montagne (Limousin, FR). A graduate of the Jan Van Eyck Academie (Maastricht, NL), his work was part of many solo and collective shows: at the Contemporary Art Museum of Rochechouart (FR), Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai, Maison des Arts Georges Pompidou, Cajarc (FR), la Criée, contemporary art center in Rennes (FR), Thalie Art Foundation, Brussels (BE), CAN Neuchatel (CH), Plateau FRAC Ile de France, Paris, MaisterraValbuena, Madrid, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Rennes Biennial, Carré d'art Contemporary Art Museum in Nîmes (FR), Crédac, contemporary art center in Ivry-sur-Seine (FR), Villa Arson, Nice (FR), Maison Populaire in Montreuil (FR), Ricard Foundation, Paris. In 2019, the Modern and Contemporary art Museum in Saint-Etienne presented a solo exhibition of his work which was accompanied by a monographic publication.