Nous trouverons un chemin, ou nous en créerons un: YANN LACROIX SOLO EXHIBITION

The world that surrounds us—whether immediately within arm’s reach or distant and beyond—is condensed on a map, its vastness almost reduced. “A landscape is a will to control” (un paysage est une volonté de contrôle), says Lacroix. As we engage with its physical presence, let us also consider its archives, both geographical and chronological. What does it mean to measure, map, seize and possess the world and its territory, he ponders, and, more importantly, to be conscious of its manipulability? This is the tension that captures Yann Lacroix. More than a mere appearance, there is a terrestrial movement housed in a landscape, its shape and movements, the type of vegetation it once held—its history and presence, its épaisseur and affect. 

Before his brush begins to carve its architecture, the palimpsest infiltrates his mind, and the result progressively tangoes between precision and improvisation in equal measure. It is infused with his subject of predilection yet without a fixed preconception—an apparition of a phantom of intent and hazard. It is precisely this open-ended, tentative exploration that resonates with the exhibition’s title, a quote by the warrior and poet Hannibal Barca: “Nous trouverons un chemin, ou nous en créerons un” (we will find a path, or we will create one). It is this resolve to find a path, or to forge one, the necessity of working through trials and uncertainties in the ongoing quest for meaning. 

Yann Lacroix’s paintings impose a stance of looking—at and for the evanescence of the painting, of the boundaries allocated to it. First, they confront us with a faint, vertiginous apparition. Then, they lead us to its point of balance, irradiating a germination of images that the artist undercoats. And in spite of everything, the pentimenti are revealed, flourishing against all odds. The transience of seasons is being peeled as much as it is outlined, layer after layer—whether it is perennial or premature. There is a gradual emergence of an unexpected phenomena, of an ensemble of flicking landscapes. It is as much of an erratic measure as it a balancing act. 

Initially taken as his photographic referents, a flood of recollections—an anamnesis, crammed as his raw material—is gleaned on his canvases. His view on landscape was unquestionably rooted in great part in his birthplace, but nevertheless by his capacity to retain places that he frequented, their geographies, physiognomies, and atmospheres. The event of each sensory encounter marks the artist. These landscapes prefigure a territory, excavating an archaeology of accumulated memory, where compositions announce a temporal threshold in which the past ceaselessly breaks into the present—timelines, spaces densely layered within the thickness of times, or what Maurice Merleau-Ponty designates as “l’épaisseur du monde”, the density of the world. Attuned to this, each brushstroke becomes an attempt to seize the ephemerality of experience—at once an idios kosmos and a koinos kosmos. Among the recurring motifs in this series is the garden, which, as the philosopher Michel Foucault said, “is the smallest parcel of the world, and yet it is the totality of the world”.1 We move through these paintings as though on a fragmented, meandering walk, a voyage on foot—each step a pause, and each pause a crossing—where the intimate and the immense continuously converge. 

Recalling Foucault’s notion of Heterotopia: “the heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible”.2 And yet, there is an irreducible cohesion in Lacroix’s paintings—a total absence of a tragic discordance. The spaces within quietly disconcert and soothe our perception, where structures surface and vanish; they are simultaneously recovered and erased, signalled and dislocated, suffused in transparency and blur. We seem to witness every gesture and brushstroke that his superimposed compositions imply, as we remain suspended between architecture and vegetation. The passage from one to the other is refracted, the vestibule is open, their contingency becomes instantaneously palpable. Likewise, Heterotopias, as Foucault writes, “are most often linked to slices in time.” They function fully when there is an “absolute break” with traditional time.3 In Lacroix’s work, temporality holds an enigmatic stasis. The enigma lays in the withdrawal of time as it tilts within the frame of the paintings. In their presence, we are liberated from relational connections that might otherwise hold us back. Verisimilitude is conquered. Time is decentred. With each rearrangement, the itinerary is indefinitely dispossessed, and in turn dispossessing us, of a fixed destination.  

However, to compulsively classify where the painting we are looking at is would be a disservice to the unfailing compass of our imagination. Making these equivalences and clairvoyance is as tempting as it is welcomed, but to confine these landscapes to an ideal of “elysian fields” is insufficient. “Essence and existence, imaginary and real, visible and invisible—a painting mixes up all our categories in laying out its oneiric universe of carnal essences, of effective likenesses, of mute meanings”, writes Merleau-Ponty.4 The painter offers us some occasional—perhaps intentional or unintentional—indices, a foretaste that shall guide our first passage. But he does not impose a single profundity to which we must adhere. Lacroix instead beckons us to orient ourselves within and to use the eye as an “archaeological instrument”: to step closer to the painting, to enter its pavements, to move around the peaks of its branches and discern the imprints which he alone can leave and preserve—marks that trace a trajectory of revelation, but just as often, of a riddle. But what if the meaning defies all bounds? From an instantaneous glimpse, we may encounter an impasse, only to carve a path through the unknown—a kind of ground clearing—and perhaps, just perhaps, we might recover what he obliterates and revises at will.  

It is not mere serendipity that rivets us to these emissions, nor is it nostalgia. It is a pathway for the gaze that yields us a certainty while we vacillate within this exchange. As Roland Barthes writes, “the effect it produces upon me is not to restore what has been abolished (by time, by distance) but to attest that what I see has indeed existed”.5 In other words, the strata of their isolated forms are still omnipresent, as is their finished totality—much like the temporality of the act of painting itself. Through the ripples reflected on our retina, we glimpse the geometry of tiles, our eyes dwell on an ostensible courtyard and its columns, on its superimposable masses. Our eyes are led back to the trajectory of scattered shells, to an aqueous florescence. The lines start to liquify. Slowly, the demarcation of a façade melts into a foliage—we are led to a verdancy in plenitude that sometimes withers across an alcove, laminating its edges—a cumulative debris of a memory in which the elements outgrow one another in perpetual motion. 

Racha Khemiri 

Tunis. July 2025. 

Nous trouverons un chemin, ou nous en créerons un runs from 10 July to 23 Auguest 2025.