Yann Lacroix’s paintings conjure spaces that both soothe and unsettle our perception. Within each composition, structures emerge and dissolve, simultaneously revealed and erased, signalled and displaced, immersed in translucency and blur. Yet, the viewer seems to witness every gesture, every layer in his superimposed process. What unfolds is an accumulation of visual memory; landscapes not as fixed geographies but as affective territories, excavating an archaeology of experience. His compositions become temporal thresholds, where the past relentlessly seeps into the present.

This series of works marks an inflection within that ongoing inquiry. Initiated in the wake of his residency in Tahiti, the paintings carry the persistent visual afterimage of that experience. Vegetation, balustrades, shadows, and all motifs gleaned from the Polynesian environment, surface and reappear as latent forms, migrating from lived experience into his painting. The residency extended Lacroix’s exploration of landscape as a site where temporal, cultural and imaginary strata converge.

What the canvas emits is not the transcription of a place. It is, rather, the slow digestion of experience. Lacroix integrates fragments gradually, allowing them to sediment within his pictorial language. The works resist illustration and operate instead through displacement and recombination. A balustrade photographed in Polynesia might intersect with a pavement borrowed in part from Vittorio Carpaccio. The painting’s title Savannakhet, the name of a Laotian city traversed a decade earlier, invokes a geography whose traces have all but vanished from the image. As Lacroix notes: “Nothing of that place persists pictorially here except the light, the sharp shadows of the vegetation…it all contributes to the idea that painting is a long process, constructed layer after layer.”

Lacroix’s paintings are sites where images from disparate geographies and epochs cohabit. They become an archive built by successive deposits of time.