[Fall 2021]

Les Impermanents
Musée des beaux­arts de Montréal
10.04.2021 — 1.08.2021

By Daniel Roy

[Excerpt]
Continuing his reflections on the materiality of light, Yann Pocreau presented a corpus of brand-new works at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the result of research conducted during residencies at the Fonderie Darling (2016–18) and the Mont-Mégantic Observatory (2018). He was investigating light sources that reach us from the heavens and exploring their physical, metaphoric, and philosophical dimensions. The exhibition Impermanencies, involving photographs made with or without a camera, gleaned images, a projection, and an in situ sculptural installation, is presented as a series meditations on light and the cosmos, inviting visitors to reflect on time, the fleetingness of life, and the finiteness
of living beings and things.

In the subdued ambience of the first gallery, the series These things that I will miss (index) (2020–21) presents thirty lumen prints. These juxtaposed sheets of photosensitive paper with washed-out colours form a polychrome grouping of gentle contrasts. Oscillating between abstraction and figuration, some of the images offer geometric compositions that reproduce the movements of the stars and planets. Other images refer more directly to objects. These hark back to early photographic works: flowers, the contours of which strongly reacted with the chemistry of the paper, evoke Henry Fox Talbot’s first photograms; a fern, carefully arranged on a blue-tinted sheet, is reminiscent of cyanotypes by Anna Atkins, the pioneer of botanical photography…

 

See the magazine for the complete article and more images: Ciel variable 118 – EXHIBITING PHOTOGRAPHY