Hélène Fauquet: Vivresse

On the top floor of the foundation, Lafayette Anticipations presents Vivresse, the first institutional exhibition in France dedicated to Hélène Fauquet. The title, a contraction of the French words vie (life) and ivresse (intoxication), evokes a state in which vital force and desire become one.

Fauquet's work holds ornamental forms in tension with a conceptual dimension that borders on Surrealism, exploring the relationships between decoration and art, nature and artifice, history and the present. Her recent sculptures centre on the shell and the questions its form raises. They originate in a simple gesture: obscuring her own photographs with a three-dimensional object, the shell itself. Set in elaborate frames that evoke the shimmer of opaline niches, these works turn the frame from a display device into a gateway to a sensory and symbolic space.