Artists

Hélène Fauquet

Press release

Meyer*Kainer presents Species of the Pod, an exhibition of Hélène Fauquet’s sculptural reflections on seashells and the questions raised by their forms. Fauquet introduces a body of work composed of her collection of seashell souvenirs mounted on top of framed photographs, close-ups of various fluids, blobs and bubbles which had been the central subject of her previous exhibitions. Glamorously framed, the resulting objects exert the scintillating appeal of opaline alcoves. The sounds of distant waves echo across the pearlescent interior of each shell, espousing the circumvolutions of its thoughts like in a surrealist dream.

Water shapes the form of rocks and shells into what is known as rocailles (where the word Rococo comes from) and it feeds the flowers and vegetation that make up the ornamental vocabulary of 18th century pan-European style. Giving the illusion of animating the inanimate, Rococo achieves dynamism through asymmetry. This fluidity has an aquatic quality that results from the interweaving of scrolls undulations and waves; it twirls and crashes to ultimately dissolve into abstraction.