Yves Popet - Denis Pondruel

One fashions cubes of concrete that enclose some kind of building. Recently, the cubes have given way to panels of perforated metal.
The other combines flat, colored squares of velvety pastel into an apparently layered, disjointed construction that leaves only their edges visible.

What Yves Popet embeds in flat shapes that yearn for the void—especially present in his pastels—Denis Pondruel hides in structures that remain ungraspable by the eye: a hiding place, a quiet corner.

Both artists prompt the beholder to envisage the invisible. What is actually happening on this sheet covered in black red, blue, yellow and gray pastel? Where are the rest of the edges of these squares?
Why beckon the beholder to go down the stairs into a dark concrete cube, or to struggle to read a perforated text, only to discover in the end that it is the invisible—the voids—that count?

Diane Lahumière Traduction Deke Dusinbere