Echos 9, 2018

Yolaine Wuest  

Yolaine Wuest, born in 1962, is a Colmar native who trained at the city's School of Plastic Arts. For ten years she was part of a collective workshop and set out on the path of abstraction.

Black is her source of inspiration. It is largely present on her canvases and she obtains it by a skilful mixture of umber, sienna...which she works with softness and depth by means of various tools (brushes, rags...). This blackness resonates within her and opens her up to a meditative search that guides her gesture and gives the canvas its title. For Yolaine Wuest, black has the power to underline forms and to bring out the light as opposed to white according to the chiaroscuro technique.

"We are the links that we weave, according to our encounters and paths of humanity. On the curved, straight or sinuous lines of our lives, they are so many delicate milestones of light that give rhythm and dynamism to our existence... Chances or obviousness, so many "possibilities" on the "weft" of our lives... ". (Y. Wuest)

In 2020, Yolaine Wuest switched from canvas to tracing paper, from black to shades of grey, but remained faithful to oil paint. A plastic digression that originated in an exhibition project in the heart of a Romanesque chapel. The choice of this material, which she impregnates with her oils and pigments, is the one used by stonecutters to guide their work. She affixes her signs, her traces in a game of transparency where the light participates in the magic of the work.

Any form of figuration is absent from Yolaine Wuest's work, but she has developed her own artistic graphology based on her emotions, her aspirations and her intuitions.

Sometimes it is words that inspire her works and guide her gestures. "I often let words that have touched me resonate within me, read them, reread them, let them open doors for me. I let them enter me, I savour them, they nourish me... I then think in shapes and lines. The hand is then only the tool, the extension of a form of resonance... A way of "opening the inverted commas"...

The inverted commas she opens resonate within us and serve as a thread between our eyes and our emotions. Sucked in by her works, we let ourselves drift delightfully to the rhythm of our reveries, our deep thoughts. It is a Baudelairian invitation to an inner journey.

"Art seems to me to be the vector of a thought, even a posture, capable of arousing emotion, whatever it may be." Y. Wuest