By Caroline Canault
Paul-Yves Poumay, distortion poétique
par Caroline Canault
The sculptures of Paul-Yves Poumay turn the body into a field of research. He exerts manual pressure upon earthen materials which are then cooked in a kiln and painted.
The artist plays with full and empty spaces, searching for movement and expressivity, thus summoning forth atypical shapes with tribal inflections. Beneath the dismantling and recreation of shapes. The very proportions of balance are revisited, Formal representation fades into its material essence, hinting at a desire, emanating the figure itself, to be erased, absorbed.
These fragmented models are an expression of figurative destructuralism. Yet Paul-Yves also insists upon his own independence when it comes to creation, ceaselessly affirming his taste for experimentation by divesting himself of all methods to reach pure freedom of gesture.
“I am not hemmed in by the needs of reproduction and I can let my mind roam freely. I fix myself no limits and love to insist, sometimes heavily, upon precise elements.”
His stage setting dramatizes materials, transforms them, augments their qualities combining the spectacular and the minute, such as the bugged-out eyes and dilated pupils which characterize some of his sculptures.
Paul-Yves Poumay admits he seeks tension, for him, art is a means of subsistence.
He engenders postures in a state of flux, with destructured curves that appear like a revelation. His work on the mutation of bodies unveils singular anatomy, that of poetic, ultra-contemporary distortion.
