Luis Adelantado Valencia Gallery is pleased to present A Figure Four Trap, the first solo exhibition of French artist Yann Serandour in Spain.
It is said that the work of a historian could be that of filling in gaps, making sense of a series of events from documentary sources and constructing, like a novelist, a narrative with a purpose and a story that actually took place. Yann Sérandour’s work is similar to the work of that historian: using artifacts taken from his predecessors, potential accidents and possibilities, directing research and hints of missing pieces, in order to prolong and challenge histories. Yann Sérandour’s work frequently refers to the conceptual art of the sixties and seventies, periods of special interest to him due to their abundant dissemination in the form of publications and prints – his favorite materials, although lately his attention moves to other fields and more distant moments, strengthening a temporal gap with our contemporaneity.
In the specific case of this exhibition, the space of the gallery and the characteristics of the rooms, both in their size and in their structure and symmetry, have added a fundamental element when generating the specific project for the gallery. Serandour’s most recent research on primitive traps used to catch small animals such as mice or birds will be the breeding ground in which he will develop both formally and conceptually the project, thus, A Figure Four Trap refers to a classic trap that has the shape of the number four.
The sculptural pieces, images or installations, many of them interstitial and mimetic, have their origin in existing works, publications and products that Yann reactivates by changing the themes. Embracing a conceptual view of art, Serandour broadens some historical expressions in other directions by infiltrating, parasitizing and performing “hijacking” operations. On the one hand, these tactics are a way to reactivate-and sometimes modify-the latent meanings of a work and, on the other hand, they can interrogate the transformations of the historical, political, and aesthetic themes associated with it.16