Yvan Alvarez
Born in 1990
Lives and works in Geneva



Yvan Alvarez trained in photography at the Centre d'Enseignement Professionnel de Vevey (CEPV), before obtaining a Bachelor's degree in visual arts (performance option) and then a Master's degree from HEAD-Geneva. In his work, Yvan Alvarez is interested in the interactions we have with our environment, and the often discreet or involuntary traces these gestures leave in space. These micro-events, perceived as insignificant, become for him the starting points for a process of reformulation, in which photography, sculpture or installation act as tools for displacement, condensation or tension.
The gesture - whether observed, replayed or displaced - is at the heart of his approach. Unspectacular, often minimal or DIY, it engages us in a reflection on our ways of acting and inhabiting the world. By extracting these fragments from reality and transposing them into the exhibition space, Alvarez creates a gap between the initial act and its reconstitution, revealing the tensions contained in what seemed insignificant.
Without directly representing the human figure, his work explores its presence in the hollow, through the forms it leaves behind. Her practice borrows from the logics of DIY and economy of means, not out of constraint but as a strategy of attention and precision. This craftsmanlike approach, sometimes tinged with absurdity, questions the symbolic and structural charge of the simplest forms, and what they say - discreetly or not.