For the first time of his career, it is not his own photos Yann Pocreau is showing under the heading of Projections at the Darling Foundry. Instead, he has chosen to draw from the iconography of his personal album a collection of antique postcards of French Gothic churches to realize the three works of this exhibition. The aging 1930s reproductions of the Saint-Laurent, Saint-Étienne-du-Mont and de la Trinité churches, the Sainte-Croix cathedral and the Sainte Chapelle are manipulated, staged, pierced, scratched, to allow the appearance of this divine light, sought after by religious architecture and here created artificially. These images are produced by way of different mediums – installation, bas-relief and film – with which the artist experiments in a “quest to throw light on the photographic object”, in his own words. In Projections, religious architecture and photography intersect to bring to light their common uses, namely sublimation and staging, illusion and dramatization.
