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The Musée de Rochechouart is delighted to announce a new solo exhibition by the artist Gyan Panchal. Influenced by the architecture of the museum, Gyan Panchal has taken over the top floor of the château to present a selection of his latest works produced for the occasion.
The exhibition Breaking the Orb opens a new chapter in his thinking. Since the highly processual sculptural research he began some ten years ago using synthetic materials such as polymers, his work today seems to be situated on the edge between the human and the non-human, the organic and the inorganic, the being and the thing.
Gyan Panchal collects objects from the landscape, and is above all interested in objects shaped by man. These utilitarian, abandoned objects become his favourite materials. Silos, buoys, planks, canoes and so on are reinvested either by covering them up or by subtracting synthetic and natural materials.
The value of use, without disappearing completely from view, is superimposed on the alterations of time. Gyan Panchal has chosen to be a sculptor, but his work could just as well be that of a painter in that it reveals a certain pictoriality in the material.
Breaking the orb (Breaking the Orb) reveals a grammar of gesture in relation to this material: arranging, splitting, subtracting, sanding. Through this series of simple interventions, Gyan Panchal produces a sculpture that is fragmented and open, revealing its interiority and vibration.
The works acquire an out-of-time dimension. In the exhibition space, they create the sensation of floating, waiting bodies, with opalescent reflections that, at first glance, confuse their nature a little more.
Henri Focillon’s comment in L’éloge de la main (1934) takes on its full force here. ‘As the accident defines its form in the hazards of matter, as the hand exploits this disaster, the mind in turn awakens. This arrangement of a chaotic world draws its most surprising effects from materials seemingly unsuited to art and improvised tools, debris, waste, whose wear and tear or fracture offer singular resources.’
Breaking the orb is a suspended landscape, a series of appearances and repetitions, balances and instabilities, a world that is both finite and open.