Hélène DELPRAT

HÉLÈNE DELPRAT

TWIST & DIE

June 3rd - August 27th 2023

Part of the final chapter of an artistic season entitled Les registres du jeu, this exhibition is part of the expected re-enchantment of the Tanneries' spaces, where, in the shadow of invited artistic gestures, new writings and narrative games take shape, oscillating between personal and collective narratives, in the rustle born of their encounter as well as their intermingling with the murmurs of a subtly mischievous inner monologue.
This summer sequence will reveal three universes to explore, populated in turn by singular plant forms from a memorable time and place - Maturités(1) by CLARA - exuberant, colorful and inventive machines - N.O.É(2) by Victor Cord'homme - or fleeting, dissipated figures from the imaginary, self-fictional worlds of Hélène Delprat with Twist & Die.

As a visual artist, Hélène Delprat explores a multitude of media, including painting, drawing, sculpture and video, on the fringes of indecisive stagings. On several occasions, she has designed and created costumes(3) and set designs for plays. Sensitive to the cinematic and spectacular universe, the artist accumulates borrowings from reality and fiction, drawing on the forms and images of everyday life as well as the history of art. At the crossroads between documentary and invention, Hélène Delprat's work is as unsettling for its eclectic referentiality as for its ability to go beyond the frame to awaken multiple imaginations. Populated by myths and tales thus heckled, a fantastic world saturated with self-mockery emerges in the Twist & Die exhibition. At once total and minimalist, the scenography reflects the abundant character of Hélène Delprat's artistic practice, and her taste for décor, for tableaux: her own, but also those of the situations she plays with. By showcasing the exuberant, baroque universe of this internationally-renowned artist, this theatrical exhibition reinforces the Art Center's reputation as a place for unique creations.

Visitors are invited to lift the curtain of the play being performed in the Galerie Haute, using the artifices associated with the show. The result is a performance ready to intoxicate the senses, a dance at once dreamlike and dark, with no beginning and no end. Constellations of luminous - almost magical - boxes, paintings - or texts - with minimalist, colorful and ornamental motifs, but also sound videos and images that become sculptures: there's no choice but to plunge into the complexity of Hélène Delprat's heuristic map, which reinvests the processes of automatic writing to create a tableau as enigmatic as it is hypnotic. Initially searching for the meaning of the scattered or joyously related references, in a frenzied round of signs and symbols, the eye is finally absorbed, immersed in an intimate understanding of the generous work of the artist for whom "Meaning can be lost, but we don't care". A curious pleasure to detect, which leads to dance, farandole or rigodon, runs through the visitor's body - contemplating the landscape that takes shape and finally getting as close as possible to the works to perceive their subtlety - and subjugates him as the main character in this staging, without whom the piece could not take place. Poking fun at the visitor, a permanent double I(u) inhabits the exhibition spaces. The artist's identity invades the work as much as it hides within it. It can be glimpsed without ever revealing itself, giving rise to a recognizably disquieting strangeness(4).

These forms of theatricalization continue in the Petite Galerie. It seems to open onto a winding, labyrinthine backstage area, where a crowd of strange, mocking or grimacing busts stand, heralding a human-scale role-playing game combining exploration of the double, its representation, identity and otherness. At the crossroads between object theater and shadow theater, Hélène Delprat's work tests the viewer as he discovers his image multiplied by reflective surfaces - a kind of optical peephole suggesting a deconstructed, non-unified perception(5) - the fruit of a reluctant reality, which twists, distorts and ironizes the slightest reflection.
Between pantomime and pretense, the artist uses her art to muddy the waters: she appropriates spaces to make them the setting for her overflowing imagination - a "bedroom of her own"(6) or her cabinet of curiosities: "I try to convey the need to overflow, the need for excess, the need for failure, the need for risk. Not to repeat oneself or to repeat oneself, but the necessity of not necessarily recognizing oneself". Juxtaposing unexpected and misappropriated elements borrowed from reality, scholarly and popular culture, Twist & Die abolishes the boundaries between the absurd and the impossible, inviting us to discover teeming realities and to decipher, with humor, complex and haunted worlds that thus take shape in a theatrical exhibition.