Hélène Delprat: En Finir avec l'extension du pire

Gallery Christophe Gaillard is pleased to announce the next exhibition of Hélène Delprat, from March 15th to April 21st, 2012. En finir avec l’extension du pire (Curated by Dominique Païni) which is ispired by the movie Les (fausses) conférences, recently presented at the Centre Pompidou, in Paris.

«If Eric Rohmer had not used it as a title for one of his films, I should gladly have entitled this tour of Hélène Delprat’s book «La Collectionneuse». For a collector is what she is: she picks, picks up, collects, keeps a collection of images. Although a far cry from the poet of the modern city or the peripatetic philosopher, she does herborize. She does not bend over towards the tarmac to pick up the leftovers of city activity in order to construct a new Merzbau or even just collages. Hélène Delprat the ‘collectionneuse’ is more of a diarist in images, a sister of the Limbourg brothers, her undertaking being a contemporary volume of «riches heures» of her life.
[…]

While the archivist’s easy-paced impulse obviously has a nineteenth century ring to it, most of Hélène Delprat’s figuration does not refer back to that century; her iconography borrows rather from the one before, that of the Enlightenment, libertines and souverains, materialist encyclopaedists and boudoir faithfuls, and regular visitors to the salons and obscene cabinets de curiosités. So this first volume is full of haunting characters, with the title «extension» promising more of the same. […] This also indicates how much this extension of the worst refers back to the interminable, irrepressible contamination of images, an anachronistic process and the transgressive energy on which are founded the primordial possibilities and conditions of art: quotation, re-use, influence, imitation.... Art is theft, it is crime.

So Fantômas is truly in his place here, the sower of death, the grim reaper of modern times. Inventory, encyclopaedia, ‘fausses confidences’, these conferences still remain confidences.»

Dominique Païni

Exhibition with the support of : Centre national des arts plastiques (Support for the first exhibition), Ministry of the Culture and the Communication.
At the occasion of the exhibition, publication at the Éditions Biffures of the book. En finir avec l ’extension du pire (with texts of Dominique Païni and Hélène Delprat).