Yann Lacroix
"Botanique"
Painting is the sole medium used by Yann Lacroix to create his works, in particular landscapes, sometimes populated by ghostly figures in a utopian and fantastical iconography guided by recollections of his travels, the potential memory of these silent places, and the history of painting. Like metaphors for the process of memory, his works feature hazy areas laid over zones of particularly precise detail, the intensity of which contrasts with the visual blurring of other parts of the canvas.
“In the body of the landscape, we sense a translucent veil but cannot know whether it is the trace of a memory of the place or a premonition; in the body of the painting, we do not know whether this veil is the remnant or the ghostly image of a previous attempt at a painting that was abandoned, or whether, on the contrary, it is the seed of a work that is displacing what is there now. Confused, our eyes no longer know whether they are witnessing the birth or the disappearance of a landscape, a painting being made or unmade. This twofold doubt unsettles the reassuring certainty of an eye that sees one thing, only to be called to look again, to peek behind the scene; a scene that the painter's brushes are working to undo”, wrote Mohamed Ali Berhouma in 2023.
Yann Lacroix’s painting mainly focuses on landscapes. Lush in appearance, they evoke the most sought-after travel destinations that have become symptomatic of a desire to return to a paradise lost, but lead paradoxically to the creation of artificial spaces. In his works, these places are transformed into the mirror of a painting punctuated by the interplay of appearances, a kind of research into the potentially evanescent nature of images, resulting in a lost emotion and the joy of trying to find that sight or feeling once again.
“Lines of perspective try in vain to organise and structure a vision of the world, to define its organic nature by enclosing a plant that soon outgrows them. The painter dismantles these strategies (of power) by allowing the lines of a sketch to emerge; by revealing his devices, he seeks to restore pictorial order with colour and brush: by eroding the structure, effacing material, and glazing in fine layers. The plasticity created by the artist, layer after layer, is made of the same material as the first layers that form the preliminary sketch of the landscape of the ancients — also referred to as the underpainting. This archaeology of the picture’s surface also excavates the landscape and its history, bringing to light what is buried, what lies beneath," continues the Tunisian researcher and writer.
Drawing on his memories (images found online, trips abroad, his everyday environment, and so on), Yann Lacroix paints deliberately composite landscapes with exotic vegetation, tropical greenhouses and swimming pools, made up of their own artificiality, but containing traces of a past or possible history that bring sensuality and life: a reflection on heterotopias through these places born out of fantasy yet imbued with the poetry of everyday life, like allegories of painting itself.
“By setting in motion the peaks from which the conquering eye seeks to take possession of the world and its horizons, Yann Lacroix's visions of landscapes invite us to adopt a different perspective. By opening the landscape to its foundations and formation, by taking us through the layers that make up its memory and history, the painter leads us to the dizzying position of a gaze that sees what was before us and what will come after us”, concludes Mohamed Ali Berhouma.
For the Art Season, a series of paintings devoted mainly to natural landscapes will be presented in several parts of the Château, including the magnificent Porcupine Room.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
Yann Lacroix was born in 1986 and studied at the École Supérieure d'Art de Clermont Métropole (2005-2010) and the Porto School of Fine Arts (2008) in Portugal. He has been awarded numerous grants and residencies, including Casa Velázquez in 2019. He earned particular recognition at the 63rd Salon de Montrouge in Paris in 2018 and has taken part in numerous group exhibitions in France and abroad
Yann Lacroix lives and works in Paris. Since 2019, he has been represented by Galerie Anne-Sarah Benichou.