Yoann Estevenin

Lives and works in Bruxelles, Belgium

Artist statement

Artist statement / Yoann Estevenin My work is deeply connected to materiality and the living world. When I begin a work, I first think about its form, and then about colour, like a vibration that brings it to life. I have always been drawn to animals, plants, and, more broadly, to anything that carries a presence. I like to look for the life and soul within a thing, including objects. Even as a child, I would give them personalities: they became icons, totems, fetishes. This way of looking at the world remains at the heart of my practice. I like to inhabit forms, invest bodies, awaken them, and give them a presence. Through drawing, ceramics, and wood, I create human, animal, and hybrid figures. They are often strange, sometimes unsettling, but also vulnerable and tender. My animals sometimes have human eyes and seem to observe us as much as we observe them. They become companions, guardians and presences that face the world alongside us. The body also occupies an important place in my work, the desired, imagined, wounded, or hurt body. I am interested in the connections between desire and pain, love and solitude, tenderness and violence, as well as in the communion of bodies with one another and with nature. Figures may appear alone, like travellers or beings moving through a landscape, yet they always carry within them the possibility of an encounter. Night has become an essential space within my universe. It deepens colours and reveals a world larger than ourselves,...

Artwork