Guided tour of the courtyard of Couëguel
Yann Détrez is a painter, sculptor and philosopher. He was born in 1927 at the Vésinet in Yvelines. In love with Brittany, he spent most of his life there, working as a teacher of letters and began to sculpt in parallel. In 1979, he moved to the manor of Coetguel in Péaule in the Morbihan where he dedicated his life to a work: sculptures, paintings, philosophical and theoretical reflections on his artistic work. His production is deeply marked by his fascination with nature in what is most primitive, most elementary. The living forms of his sculptures seem familiar to us and yet represent nothing known. We find in the fluidity of the curves, life at its original stage, before "things are not". We then perceive the infinite, the creative energy of the world, the embryonic stage of the living. It is not a question of Yann Détrez reproducing the roundness of a head or a breast, but of stealing the momentum that makes beings. Is it a knee or a shoulder? Is it a branch or a beast? It’s life, one and multiple. The non-figuration of Yann Detrez crosses the real and suggests it. In his painting, we find his identity as a sculptor. The material is always of fundamental importance with techniques of colour superposition and very thick oil painting. The harmony of forms, fullness and looseness of matter, the balance of volumes and the beauty of lines once again reflect his search for the living.