ACHEIROPOÏÈTES

Winner of a production grant from Rubis Mécénat in partnership with the church of Saint-Eustache and the Beaux-Arts de Paris, Marc Lohner, a 5th year student, is presenting an installation of five strips of fabric suspended in the heart of the church. Curated by Marc Donnadieu.

For the Acheiropoïètes exhibition, a Greek term meaning "not made by the hand of man", Marc Lohner did not attempt to represent the divine, but wanted to reveal what the hand of time, or sometimes involuntarily and voluntarily that of human beings, has left on the walls of the church. To do this, he systematically photographed all the faces of the octagonal limestone blocks that serve as the bases for the church's eighty-two interior pillars, as well as other parts that are less accessible to the eye but still bear the original traces of the building's various construction periods.

After making, sorting and classifying all the images obtained, he printed the most characteristic of them on five strips of translucent linen fabric that he hung between certain pillars, almost twelve metres high. Thanks to subtle effects of perspective, tone on tone and transparency, the photographic skins of the church are superimposed on its natural limestone skins, the pixels of the image on the grains of the stone. In this way, the viewer's gaze is carried away by a double, inverted movement of falling towards the paving on the ground and rising towards the aerial vaults, a constantly renewed coming and going between materiality and immateriality, gravity and lightness, shadow and light...
 

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