According to the well-known Duchampian perspective on photography, Yan Morvan knows that “action” in itself isn’t much: only its consequences make sense. That’s why, horsing around with his often-scandalizing models, who don’t fit the classical—aloof and anorexic—standards, the artist poses them so as to play with fetishism and its frills and thrills.
Hence his fixation with droll ceremonies which are like appetizers, like preludes to the afternoon of intractable fauns. Every photograph becomes the mounting, the mold, the receptacle for orgasmic orgies, and subverts all commonplaces about representation without losing any of its depth.
Far from “basic,” purely emotional or aesthetic reactions, Yan Morvan strikes and echoes a particular form which is as much visionary as voyeuristic. He rejects any hint of melancholy and instead goes for incisive humor to the point where images eludes conventions.
Sometimes colore wins over disegno, and the models star in a disjointed story.From the image emanates an atmosphere of regained freedom. It is also questioning. Rather than arrive at forms whose perfection would cleave the flux, Yan Morvan favors the production of places that bring together and break apart. The presences he stages are unsettling through their attitudes and poses. Men among their fetishes are but hungry lambs. They graze on their own shadow. And women with voluptuous shapes propose a poetic metamorphosis of Eros. One must abandon reason and let it crumble.
Instead, all confidence is invested in emotion through the irruption of dense forms like those of a deep, silent river of Love. In a subtle alliance between provocative forms and the effects produced by the delicate fabrics of chic undergarments, the artist compels us to acquiesce to the unknown. Every shot unravels appearances and offers a secret morsel of the land of erotic games. The image calls on vital excess by bridging what one sees and what remains hidden.
Paradoxically, and not without humor, Yan Morvan both breaks with and draws upon ostentation and phantasia. The nude is no longer in stasis, but churning, whipped around by the wind. Everything is a game: one image imbibes an oceanic breast, another moves mounds of flesh, opulent backsides.
Jean-Paul Gavard-Perret
BOOK
Yan Morvan, Mondo sex
Text by Stephan Levy-Kuentz
Editions Chez Higgins
N°53 From Erotica collection
Portfolio collector with 15 signed prints in 30 copies
200€
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