Yvan Alvarez

Lives and works in Geneva, Switzerland

Artist statement

While primarily taking the form of installations, Yvan Alvarez’s artistic practice often operates conceptually in the manner of photography. He proceeds by framing, by extracting elements from reality to freeze them and insert them into the exhibition room, sometimes intact, sometimes fragmented or reconstructed, sometimes hidden. They are relics, carried into the art space with a deliberate economy of means and a rigorous precision. Rather than ready-made, these images and objects act as deflectors, drawing our attention to what is out of the frame, or plainly missing. Their meaning unfolds in these interstices, these suspended and almost indefinite spaces from which fragmentary narratives emerge, whose deciphering is strewn with traps – some of which are physical. Objects and images have a restricted autonomy. Frequently stemming from the artist's personal history and experiences, they also embody a failure to transmit something of his experience, and a certain defeatism. Rather than focusing our attention on these intimate narratives, they draw it to these limits, to the breaking points of this transmission. But in return, they also offer a new experience, generated by the almost performative tensions between what is given and what is concealed. If they adopt a strategy of withdrawal, and express a form of disenchantment, the works of Yvan Alvarez also contain a latent part, and with it the possibility, distant though it may be, of a resolution, of a reconnection....

Artwork