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.

The works Point de vue II (2024) and Quadrilobe (2024) were conceived during a residency at the Abbaye Royale de Fontevraud. These works are steeped in the singular temporality of the site. For seven centuries a place bound by vows of silence, later transformed into a penal colony in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and now a heritage monument and artists’ residence, the abbey carries strata of spiritual, carceral, and cultural memory.

In modest resonance with this layered history, Lacroix immersed himself in the rhythm and weight of its architecture. The series does not directly depict the abbey’s structures, the paintings rather evoke historical sites encountered for their visual impact and symbolic charge. These spaces are filtered through imagination, becoming landscapes from memory rather than representations of specific monuments.

In Quadrilobe, geometry becomes both framework and play. The quadrilobed form appears at once ornamental and structural. It anchors the composition in a tension between symmetry and dissolution. The tension lies also in Untitled between a sculpted stone and a central gradient shifting from blue to green. The blue functions as a poetic index, subtly leading the gaze outward, beyond the confines of masonry. The viewer’s eye is first drawn toward the luminous centre, then guided back across the surface by the rendering of stone. The image hovers on the edge of abstraction as a symbolized landscape where architectural mass yields to atmosphere. Contemplation emerges tinged with melancholy.

Material density and historical thickness were already present in Lacroix’s earlier cycles, notably in Imago at the Fondation Bullukian, where he integrated artefacts from the Gallo-Roman Museum of Lyon into the exhibition scenography, and continue in his forthcoming exhibition Casus Belli at the Abbaye d’Hambye. Across these projects, painting enters into direct dialogue with architectural remnants and archaeological fragments, extending its surface into a space of lived and inherited history.

For Lacroix, architecture and painting are understood as historically intertwined. They both construct spaces of projection and belief, and they both endure as witnesses to human passage. Lacroix captured this through layering, erasure, and luminous recession.