YOEL BENHARROUCHE AND PLAYING WITH SCULPTURE

SCULPTURE THAT MOVES

One of the great pleasures of Yoel Benharrouche’s work is how he manages to combine so many perspectives into one plane. Even his two-dimensional pieces give the feeling that one has walked into a whole world of color, shape, and form. Yoel’s playfulness with  the picture plane make his sculptures are all the more interesting.

Take “LE SECRET DE MES RÊVES” for example. As a two-dimensional image, we’re split between the four planes of the picture plane, intersecting at the heart of Yoel’s dreaming figure. Two of these planes place the figure in the dark, or the nighttime, while the third and fourth embrace the light of day. LE SECRET DE MES RÊVES or “The secret of my dreams,” is the middle-state between waking and sleeping, between darkness and light. Yoel places his sleeping woman between the ever-elusive forces of ‘good’ and ‘evil.’ The brilliance of the painting is that it’s dimensionality gives it more meaning.

But in his sculpture, “LE SECRET DE MES RÊVES,” Yoel presents his woman whole. She is as three-dimensional as you and I. Yoel creates layers in his sculpture the way an individual collects years, they pile up on our faces, our arms, and our hips. They lift us up into growing, spiritual beings. Yoel’s “LE SECRET DE MES RÊVES” sculpture begins at the legs and builds up, gaining energy from the construction of the figure’s delicate curves. Here, she is only a woman dreaming, protectively holding her legs in with her arms as if to suggest she is whole unto herself. In her dream-state she is both totally asleep and totally alive, perfectly, three-dimensionally, whole. Other sculptures of Yoel’s include “LA MARIÉE DU CIEL” a plexiglass sculpture, made in one piece, as a homage to self-consciousness, music, and femininity, and “INSTINCTS DE VIE” a layered metal sculpture that alloys the human form with the instrumental, creating a bass out of a bassist and his muse. Yoel’s sculpture is unarming in the way it audaciously bends the rules of nature, and instead Yoel creates his own reality out of spirit and flesh.