Yann Pocreau

Se fueron los curas 3

2007

Chromogenic print

Original work
154 x 97.7 cm

Collection of the Musée d’art de Joliette

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Location

253, rue Lindsay, Drummondville

Description of the work

Part of Yann Pocreau’s early photographic work, Se fueron los curas 3 [the priests have left] was shot in Spain, in a seminary that was abandoned after the fall of the Franco regime. It is part of a series entitled Les dialogues acrobatiques in which the artist seeks to enter into a dialogue with forgotten spaces he selects for their historical, geographic or political value and which have been erased from the urban fabric.

In his approach, the artist aims to map these forsaken spaces. Through his own body, he gains a sense of place and reveals the lost realities of both the anecdotes and broader picture. These strong physical presences that reoccupy the space meld with the architecture to convey its density. The works also reveal the architecture of the light—its materiality and omnipresence despite the absence of people.

The artist creates to bring the traces of a forgotten reality to light and have the echo of the voices of a given past resonate within us.

Yann Pocreau

About the artist

Yann Pocreau was born in Québec and now lives and works in Montréal. In his recent research, he explores light as a living subject through a range of mediums, including photography, sculpture and installation. Active since the mid 2000s, he has presented his works in solo and group exhibitions around the world: Québec, Canada, the US and Europe, including the 2019 Rencontres d’Arles. The multiple award-winning artist has also been cited in articles and magazines and featured in several exhibition catalogues.

Yann Pocreau’s works are now part of several private, corporate and museum collections, including those assembled by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Musée d’art de Joliette, Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (CPOA), National Bank of Canada, Hydro-Québec and Deloitte.

Artistic approach

Manipulating light

In recent years, Yann Pocreau has focused his work on research into the potential narrative contributions that the presence of light can suggest when it is brought out in a space. His latest projects highlight the presence of light in its materiality and endeavour to reveal its traces. In the artist’s work, light becomes a material to create and subject in and of itself. To delve into light as a material in new ways, he leaves photography behind to explore other mediums such as sculpture and installation.

Through his experimentations, Yann Pocreau has developed works and created interventions that call attention to artificial light and consider its tangible dimension. Little by little, the colours and materiality of light overtake the body-space relationship that characterized his earliest works. Human presence is replaced with light as a creative material in the artist’s photographs, installations and sculptures.

In his own words: “[…] White or coloured, referring to film, the lightbulb and Kodak’s obsolete colour reference card, these luminous interventions have taken me down new, more exploratory, more abstract and yet increasingly contextual paths.”

Yann Pocreau is especially interested in his own relationship to light and its fundamental contribution to his work and photographic thought. In a certain sense, he examines the codes of artificial light and calls into question the ways in which it influences our grasp and perception of the world.

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