Horsetail Painting

Alfredo Yache lives and creates in Anjou, in the heart of the nature that inspires and animates him. For more than thirty-five years, Yache has explored the image, navigating between photography and painting, oscillating between instant capture and inspiration matured over time. His slow, thoughtful approach is rooted in the mysteries of trees, those fascinating beings that are both powerful and light, rooted and aerial, embodying the paradox between strength and fragility, matter and emptiness. ‘The most important thing in drawing a tree is the air between the leaves’, said Matisse. Yache also immerses himself in the magic of botany, where each flower, each plant, reveals to his eyes an almost cosmic sensuality or strangeness. For him, nature cannot be summed up in the simple gaze of the lens or the frozen mise-en-scène of painting. In 1990, he changed his relationship with photography, his preferred art form. When he scratched the surface of a Polaroid with a stylus, he transformed a simple photographic image into a unique work, in which the artist's hand imposed its vision, modifying the frozen representation. For several years, he devoted himself to this transformation, bending the instantaneity of the photograph to the contemplative slowness of the painter. Each work is concentrated in eight square centimetres, these small units then coming together to form larger compositions. Each element is an entity in its own right, but when assembled with others, it becomes part of a whole that has never been seen before. Yache shows that what may seem insignificant - a shadow, a shade of sky, a spot of light - can become central. The image bursts into multiple facets that respond to each other and engage in dialogue. Like the Cubists and Impressionists, Yache reinvents the way we look at things: colours break up, lines are broken, and perspectives each play in their own space. For ten years, he worked to break down the fleeting nature of photography to incorporate the dimension of time, inviting the eye to escape beyond the frame. This quest has now produced what he was looking for: fragmented compositions, the fruit of a long journey, which he has now decided to reveal. His works begin with a photographic gesture, which he systematically alters before leaving behind in favour of the brush.