Blouin Division is pleased to present the latest exhibition by Yann Pocreau at its Montreal gallery. First presented in Toronto in the spring of 2025, this exhibition, titled de légers décalages, brings together a new series of images, each meticulously selected and reworked for the narratives they evoke. Gathered, found, collected, these vernacular images call forth a story more than a subject, a deliberately fragmented and often elliptical story. Like a film excerpt or a novel passage where an action unfolds or has unfolded, where a moment has stretched, where an atmosphere has taken shape, this body of work invites us to activate memory, to summon the impossible yet potential memory of others’ images. In the end, they are all undeniably tied to what we seek in them. What do we hope to see? What do we expect of images? What do they reveal of our refusal to look? Between desires and expectations, how does showing, or showing that one is not showing, speak to our relationship with this desire to see? These questions have occupied the artist for several years.

For some time now, he has been working with these existing images that he searches out and reactivates. Sometimes archetypal or stereotypical, other times meaningful in relation to the history of the photographic medium, these photographs as objects are eloquent. The surface of these photographs is shown at its most vulnerable. Stained, burned, scratched, revealing their tears, dust, and breaches, these images bear countless marks of time that redraw their composition, obscure the image, and shift its meaning. The lines of force, the folds, the golden highlights, the cutouts and reassemblies, all simple gestures by the artist, nonetheless animate these images differently, bending the narratives they summon.

These so-called failed images, blurred, layered with multiple viewpoints, damaged by time or by the artist, form an ensemble in which, behind the complex simplicity of their composition, tensions emanate, interrupted narratives emerge, sometimes sensual, often nearly cinematic.