Achéiropoïètes

As part of its commitment to emerging contemporary creation, Rubis Mécénat supports the professional development of students at the Beaux-Arts de Paris. Each year since 2021, the Rubis Mécénat Prize has enabled an artist to imagine and design a work for Saint-Eustache church, with the critical guidance of a curator.

The 2023 winner, Marc Lohner, created the installation Acheiropoïètes (acheiropoeita), a Greek term meaning “not made by the hand of man”, presented from 3 October to 17 December 2023 at the Saint-Eustache church, with curatorial support from Marc Donnadieu.

The artist wanted to reveal the marks left by the hand of time and the human hand on the stones of the church. To this end, he photographed the limestone blocks which form the bases of pillars of the church, and other less visible areas, and printed the most representative examples on five widths of linen hung between the pillars of the church to a height of some fifteen metres. Marc Lohner approaches the architecture of the church as if it were a huge piece of sensitive paper bearing the imprint of everything that has happened there over the course of almost 800 years. Through subtle use of counterpoint, tone on tone, and transparency, the photographic skins of the church are superimposed on its natural limestone skins, and the pixels of the image are overlaid on the grain of the stone. The eye is therefore drawn in two opposing directions -downwards towards the paved floor and upwards towards the lo  y vaults– alternating constantly between the tangible and the intangible, gravity and lightness, shadow and light.