Long kept at a distance from interiors, yellow is now asserting itself as a sculptor's color. From Léa Mestres' mosaic to Vincent Dubourg's bronze, and including the printed pieces of Post Industrial Crafts, three houses are making it a material in its own right, capable of conveying light, memory, and gesture.
No color is as divisive as yellow. Long relegated to accessories and dreaded on walls, it is now being used not as a hue, but as a raw material. Three approaches, as different as can be in their methods, bear witness to this.
Léa Mestres works with it like kneading dough. Based between Paris and Audierne, she sculpts oversized lamps that are as much familiar objects as they are creatures. Her piece Franck , presented by the Carpenters Workshop Gallery, stacks two conical volumes covered in an irregular yellow mosaic, where each tessera captures and reflects the light. The color acts like a skin, born from the mineral mixture the artist calls her "lelelite." For Léa Mestres, yellow doesn't illustrate joy; it creates it.
@leamestres
In Vincent Dubourg's work, it becomes an instant explosion. The sculptor, who casts bronze as others bend wood, has created with Bhanga Yellow a sideboard captured at the moment of its rupture: the serene facade disintegrates into a shower of yellow fragments suspended in mid-air. Here, yellow does not soothe; it reveals the fracture and exposes the energy contained within a 700-kilogram piece, produced in an edition of eight since 2014.
@vincentdubourgatelier
Post Industrial Crafts, finally, approaches color through recycled materials. Founded in 2014, the company has built its own ecosystem of robots to print, on a large scale, digital crafts from reclaimed polycarbonate and aluminum.
Waste becomes sculpture, and yellow, one of the possible hues in a palette born from industrial processes. It can be found on seating like the Schuss Chair or on sofas with taut lines, where the color adheres to a structure designed to last rather than to seduce.
Three processes for the same color: mosaic, which makes it tactile; bronze, which creates tension; and printing, which recycles it. Yellow ceases to be a decorative choice and becomes a deliberate statement. The most difficult color to live with is also the one that, sculpted, best knows how to hold a space.
