Yoann Mérienne
b. 1987, France · Lives and works in Lyon, France
Before paint reaches the canvas, Yoann Mérienne often begins by working in three dimensions. He constructs forms, studies their volume and stages the light that falls across them before translating the image into paint. This movement back and forth between sculpture and painting is fundamental to his practice. Bodies appear built rather than simply depicted: planes fold, break and overlap, while concentrated passages of light carve figures out of predominantly black, white and grey surfaces. The same angular energy carries into his bronze and aluminium sculptures, where mass and gesture are held in tension.
Born in Sallanches in the French Alps in 1987, Mérienne began with drawing and comics before discovering painting through evening classes attended with his mother and grandfather. At thirteen, he received the gold medal at the Concours International de Wallonie. He graduated in Industrial Design in 2009, spent the following year in Australia, and on his return chose to devote himself fully to art. He subsequently established his studio in Lyon.
Mérienne draws from sources that move freely between academic painting, mythology, cinema, comics and video games. Warriors, travellers, nymphs, animals and imagined beings recur throughout his work, often displaced from any clearly defined historical setting. Although their scale and anatomy can appear heroic, the figures are rarely straightforward emblems of strength. Solitude, hesitation, exhaustion and silence frequently sit beneath their physical presence. Through them, Mérienne returns to elemental human impulses: survival, ambition, pride, fear, mortality and the awareness of one’s own limits.
His more recent work has brought the question of inheritance increasingly to the foreground. Historical paintings are quoted, cropped, reconstructed or translated into new spatial and material conditions. For Mérienne, returning to an existing image is not an exercise in reproduction; it is a way of testing how images survive through repetition and transformation. Painting, sculpture and the history of images therefore remain closely entangled in a practice that moves continuously between imitation, memory and invention.