Yannick Ganseman is something of a loner, artistically speaking: his ceramic bas-reliefs
and carved wood sculptures seem, in their medium and subject matter (still lives,
genre scenes), outside of time, shielded from the contemporary. The more one looks at
them, however, the more this impression recedes. What at first seems like an apparent
indifference to time turns into a cogent and subtle embrace of the contemporary as a
condition of temporal awareness and historical consciousness.
The contemporary is present in Ganseman’s works not through representation (as was Pop
Art back in the day) but through a cleavage between the times of history, of making and
of visual apprehension. Ganseman’s invocations of the Della Robbia brothers, Vincent van
Gogh, Robert Gober and Rembrandt, and his hybridisations of materials (ceramics, wood,
plexiglass, and, more recently, etching) are devoid of the irony of certain postmodern
gestures, which only reinforced their perishable nature. Rather Ganseman’s objects gum up
the act of looking, forcing upon the viewer a diffuse consciousness of time, irreducible
to the past. To borrow from the English philosopher Peter Osborne, Ganseman’s carefully
crafted and often diminutive surfaces result in a disquieting effect of contemporaneity
as a ‘disjunctive conjunction of times’.