The photographic investigation carried out by Matthieu Gafsou on the Catholic church in Fribourg is without concession and is both subjective and a documentary at the same time. In a perpetual dichotomous movement between the deepest black and an almost dazzling white, luminous and inanimate architectural views are exhibited, which is one of the photographer’s specialties, and the figures incarnated by the Church and its liturgies shown in Caravaggio-inspired light and shade. One can’t help but feel this work through the spectre of the history of art, given how important the role of the Church was in this perspective. In his rigorously structured and polished composition, to an extent it is the grandeur of sacred art and ecclesiastic patronage that Matthieu Gafsou evokes while simultaneously dissecting a Catholic iconography that has a little too much bling and seems out of touch.

Matthieu Gafsou considers that death is omnipresent within the church: ‘The walls of the convents are crumbling and the ecclesiastic succession is not guaranteed, the lack of money is visible and the dogma is struggling to adapt to today’s society”: it is the sadness of this decadent tragedy that touched the photographer, which illustrates this end of reign very poetically. Irony springs up here and there casting a critical light on it but no-one is on trial.