Hélène Fauquet, Vivresse

On the Fondation’s top floor, Lafayette Anticipations presents Vivresse, the first institutional exhibition in France dedicated to the artist Hélène Fauquet. About Vivresse - a contraction of vie (life) and ivresse (intoxication)-invites visitors to discover a state in which vital force and desire become one. Hélène Fauquet’s distinctive body of work illustrates a tension between ornamental forms and a conceptual dimension bordering on Surrealism. Her recent work explores the themes of decoration and art, nature and artifice, history and the present. The shell has taken the measure of the work and is ready to absorb it. Hélène Fauquet’s sculptures explore shells and the questions their forms raise. The genesis of these sculptures lies in the act of obscuring her photographs with a three-dimensional object - that of the shell. Extravagantly framed, these objects exude the shimmering allure of opaline niches. The frames transcend their function as mere display devices to become a portal into a sensitive and symbolic space. Her work focuses on the residues of photography and the movement of images. In her 2023 exhibition Phenomena at the Kunsthaus Glarus in Switzerland, she developed a phenomenological approach to perception, reflecting on how information is stored. Since 2023, Hélène Fauquet has incorporated the motif of the bubble, inspired by the world of advertising, scientific photography, and domestic trinkets. Conceived as an unstable form, the bubble oscillates between transparency and reflection, with no fixed shape, appearing as an organism in perpetual motion… until it disappears Read more Toggle Mixed media