Yannick Pouliot
"Yannick Pouliot" by Christine Redfern, Summer 2008, pp. 99-100
You might feel like you’ve stumbled into a high-end furniture store upon entering Yannick Pouliot’s exhibition. In front of you sit four strange chairs covered in silky imported fabrics and boasting carved mahogany woodwork. But don’t try to sit down! Their designs are twisted to reflect the psyche, not the shape of a person. Pouliot’s manipulation of furniture and architectural spaces is refreshingly unique in contemporary art—the outcome witty, and often sexy.
Pouliot’s art uses the language of 18th- and 19th-century decorative movements. His works’ titles, like the sculptures themselves, combine the names of furniture styles and human traits. Régence: monomaniaque consists of a chair permanently attached to three facing chairs by a cylindrical form that passes through their backs. Empire: possessif is a double-decker number, with one seat positioned directly above the other, while Eastlake: intransigeant presents an upside-down cupola, a hard-to-enter, lushly appealing bowl. “These high-end luxury items are very seductive, conventionally beautiful,” says Pouliot. “I use this beauty in the hopes of attracting the public to the work to contemplate more profound ideas about living and possessing.”
On the walls are ten stencils, each showing a grouping of chairs in silhouette in the manner of popular pre-photography portraits. There is also a large architectural installation titled Louis XVI: indifférent. It consists of a room made up of many long, slim hallways radiating from a central chandelier. At the end of each narrow corridor sits a chair. These chairs were not handmade by Pouliot and the public is encouraged to sit in them. This maze-like room, like his sculptures, is concerned with our psychological space more than our physical space.
Pouliot and I each take a seat. We stare at each other from 20 feet apart; there is no other place we can look. This work, unlike his previous installation Le Courtisan, is a shared experience. Pouliot comments, “In the end I realized this is a social construction as much as an architectural construction. For me it resembles the networks we have built on the Internet. They connect us to other individuals and help us communicate, but in many ways they isolate us as well.”
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