In her Cathédrales series, created in 2014, Laurence Aëgerter opened a book from the fifties (Cathédrales et églises de France) on the central double page which showed the gothic cathedral of Bourges. In her studio, every minute for two hours, she captured the movement of the sun and the projected shadow from the windows which was gradually obscuring the reproduction, until it became invisible. Cathédrales hermétiques is the follow up to this series. Moving away from the facades, she focuses on three church interiors, tackling ten centuries of architecture, from a Romanesque church (Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire) to a gothic church (Coutances) and an even more modern cathedral (Sainte-Jeanne-d’Arc in Nice). Silkscreened with an ink reactive to the heat of the sun, the images are unveiled when exposed to sunlight. The heat penetrates each layer to better reveal it. Laurence Aëgerter invents a new method of photo development: the dark room exists in broad daylight.
Fannie Escoulen