Autoportraits et autres ruines
September 14 - October 12, 1996
Paul Lacroix continues his work on shadows. True self-portraits, Lacroix’s works are first taken from Polaroid photographs of his own shadow projected onto slate rocks. The geometrically non-perfect, almost stepped, appearance of the rock varies the density of the shadows in lighter or darker tones. Indeed, Lacroix uses the fact that the vertical plans of the “staircase” gives dark tones while the horizontal planes create the light shadows. For the artist, the “great magic” of these Polaroids is that we obtain an almost total erasure of what was rock to reveal only the shadow. The rock faints, so to speak. All that remains of it is only fine memories of a more or less violent nature: cracks, faults or objects, for example a leaf that would have landed at random from its flight.
If the images of Lacroix are sometimes at the limits of abstraction, we will say that surprisingly it is possible to recognize literally, beyond the dark mass, the silhouette of the artist to profile. He says himself, but, he says, “I have no age!”