Luc Ming Yan (b. 1994, Dijon, France) is a French painter who lives and works in Dijon, France. Yan’s painting works are endowed with powerful gestural energy and denote a high level of executive concentration. Yan picks up painting there where others have let it drop: the midpoint of abstract expression and the studious way of thinking barely sketched figures and animals into account.
Yan is quick with his brush when he paints his abstract compositions of skilfully contrasting colours, carefully creating light effects rather than the sensations of depth that the great gestural painters did not hesitate to set in motion to the great delight of the illusionists. He paints in Shanghai as he paints in Dijon, reclusive and quiet, rarely mixing, always working on his canvases whether they are abstract series, rather old-fashioned in that they are concerned only with painting and assert nothing about images, or small formats of childish monsters or expressive creatures reproduced by brushwork. Rat, frog; specifically identified birds (Gypseous barbatus) these figures are placed against backgrounds with our real depth but are nevertheless formed by shadows on the ground. The touch is tighter, the movement less sweeping, and only an ear or a paw captures the light. The monsters are plastic figurines from TV series, Mangas or cartoons: we can still sense the plastic basket in which these vestiges of childhood battles pile up and which we find in Sunday garage sales. The abstract of average format would be this slight shift in current strategies, which no longer tolerate the gigantism and duck canvas of their American German uncles, and of which the canvas-mounted stretcher prepared as it was in the past would have become the evidence of today. Yan’s paintings exclude the scent of the successful art school, the fineness of the colours, and the judicious placing of pictorial moments impart this disabling and prospective timelessness because it is nonsensical.
