This text presents the artist’s approach and philosophy:

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Born in Dakar in 1968 to a Vietnamese mother and a Russian father, Yann Masseyeff has always lived surrounded by cultural diversity. This plural identity is reflected in his work: powerful, instinctive stoneware sculptures that question the place of the individual within society.

Now based in his studio in Saint-Amadou, in the south-west of France, he shapes the material by hand or with a simple wooden stick:

“One form leads to another, until the sculpture tells me: that’s enough — don’t add more.”

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After an early path shaped by encounters in the worlds of art and drawing, Yann Masseyeff turned to clay to explore its spiritual and universal dimension.

For him, modelling the earth is not a technical gesture but a vital act. He works the raw material as one would engage in a dialogue with oneself — without sketches, without the will to control. Each piece is born from an initial impulse, an inner rhythm. Gesture precedes thought.

This intuitive, almost meditative process reconnects the artist to a universal memory. The forms that emerge seem to arise from an ancient elsewhere, from a language shared by humankind and inscribed for millennia in our gestures.

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His Black and White diptychs embody this reflection. Each sculpture asserts its own identity, its strength, its individuality. Seen alone, it exists fully; placed among others, it dissolves into the collective — and from that collective emerges the energy of the many. Shadows, reflections and contrasts intertwine like human destinies, oscillating between light and darkness.

 

Black reveals white, and white enhances black: difference draws the eye and questions the hierarchy of values. The isolated piece becomes by turns the elite and the excluded, exposing the fragile balance of social harmony.

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Up close, individuality dominates; from afar, equilibrium appears. Between the two lies a void — not an absence, but a breath, a silence, a promise. It symbolises the unknown, the future, the space yet to be claimed.

Each diptych bears the same title, Black and White, translated into different languages — a sign of universality.

Clay, the primal and creative material, unites everything: the direct contact between hand and matter, with no tool and no filter, restores an essential connection to what grounds us.

 

“My sculptures don’t seek to represent the world — they contain it. They speak of us, of how we perceive ourselves, and of what we might become.”​​

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