In Yoann Estevenin's work, there's a touch of James Ensor or Odilon Redon, a kind of poetic, fantastic atmosphere that envelops all his works without appearing to do so. There's also a strange sense of tightrope walking when you see his ever-curious characters, who seem to be just passing through, as if they were walking on the edge of the world, ready to topple over the next moment and mysteriously, and for no reason at all, escape us.

Following on from his work on paper, the young artist has been experimenting with wood for some time now. It's a fine spirit to leave the sheet for the thickness, if not of the tree, of a material that has the power to remain alive and always willing and able to express itself, even when covered and overlaid with the pastels and other color substitutes he's used to exploring. And above all, he loves to burn its surface, to incise it, to rough it up like an engraver or sculptor, to give it a kind of augmented reality, elevating the drawing to the rank of a subtle and precious bas-relief. The medium lends itself particularly well here, as Yoann Estevenin attempts to draw us into his cinematic reverie.

Camera gaze. What's going on inside the head of this enigmatic, costumed, tie-wearing figure, at once serious and disquieting? And what about all those slightly grotesque creatures, animals, plants and objects, bustling around him, spinning and vibrating like distorted shadows emerging from a magic lantern? A horse and rider approach from afar. A wolf crosses the plain alone and boldly. Time seems to have suddenly stopped around a sequence shot where suspense mingles with curiosity. Everything is in place, and everything jostles about like the scattered elements of a waking dream. Our minds float between fiction and reality. In an instant, the clapper is given and the session begins.

This is the art of Yoann Estevenin, master of illusion, to move forward masked, subtly hiding behind the opacity of an existence always ready to emerge or re-emerge. Of wanting to conceal a few too salient truths beneath the murky surface of the work, whether drawn, painted or sculpted. In the face of these distractedly buried things, in the materiality of line laid down layer after layer, the eye escapes, wanders, drawn by some whimsical or incongruous detail, some clue that sometimes proves to be an intruder, only to lose itself in the obsolescence of the subject. As quickly as they appear, they disappear, and the images that make up this little fiction scroll by one by one, seeming to fade away, at once devoid of any retinal persistence, but definitively imprinted in the hollow of our memory.

Just try it. Close one eye and then open it again. Turn around, come back ... only to find that the story is no longer the same. The script will already have evolved, the actors will have changed places, and perhaps the scenery will suddenly appear to us from a different angle. From one strangeness to the next, Yoann Estevenin possesses this divine power, this astonishing ability to literally take us through his works and into the intimate, fanciful weave of his dreams.

Jean Marc Dimanche