PARIS.- Ten years after her video W.O.R.K.S & D.A.Y.S. was shown in the vestibule at La maison rouge, Hélène Delprat has imagined an exhibition specifically for the Foundation, titled I Did It My Way. Dark films and mirrors, vast paintings with hilarious titles, cinema voices, radiophonic drawings, birds’ heads, photocopies, Louis XIV, Georges Franju’s Judex and the curious rite of the tonsure… here’s what we can expect from this «lugubrious game»1, one that is both serious and funny. Hélène Delprat likes nothing more than to play around with L’Extension du Pire, the monstrous ugliness or beauty of things2, Macbeth’s witches, actors, the ridiculousness in each of us, laughter…

Inspired by literature – from Ovid’s The Metamorphoses to the contemporary novel by way of Mary Shelley and Virginia Woolf – film, internet databases, radio and press, each day brings new opportunity for Hélène Delprat to develop a sensitive and darkly humoristic art that takes in both fiction and documentary. She has, for the past several years, embarked on the contemporary volume of the Très riches heures de sa vie in painting, film, drawings and photography. Her filmed journal and Days blog are part of this, together with Les (fausses) conférences, a film which strings together a world of scheduled and unscheduled moments, including appearances by Eric von Stroheim, Buzz Aldrin and Jean Cocteau, among others.

Hélène Delprat’s work is about representation, memory, legacy and recording. The energy-images she proposes – whatever the medium – trigger constellations and offshoots, figurative and conceptual associations, inventories almost.

Hélène Delprat is like a character from her work, sympathetic towards dandies, extravagants, and those who, without the least pretension, cherish fake and finery with equal delight. Delving constantly into «the bric-a-brac of which we are made»3, she is at pains never to become trapped in the world she invents, extricating herself through documentaries and interviews4. Her singularity and curiosity make her an artist in a category of her own.

Corinne Rondeau Extracts from « L’univers est la cendre d’un dieu mort » published in the exhibition’s catalogue co-published by Fage and La maison rouge
Hélène Delprat’s art is the realm of fantastical, impenetrable beings, a procession of surprises, disorientations, excess, and small, simple things, of odds and ends, of memories of cinema, theatre, paintings and pop songs. On the way, shadows and silhouettes, mannequins, the gates of haunted castles, stairways leading nowhere or other images: mysterious corridors, fun-house doors and mirrors, pictures like caves peopled with hybrid beings. An open path: we don’t know where it is leading ’cos there’s always a tree hiding the forest, the anger of a goddess, a marvellous detail in the middle of a corruption, a naughty hint of truancy. “It is the unknown that frightens,” repeats a voice, and the exhibition begins. To start with, you need to love mystery, disquiet and have the desire to go and see what is on the other side. And, most of the time, enjoy finding something other than what you were looking for, as in The Three Princes of Serendip. If it is not the simple devaluation of the known, the unknown is the experience of a world reigned over by dreams and that speaks only of death. Like what Heurtebise says in L’Orphée by Jean Cocteau: “I am bringing you the secret of secrets, mirrors are the doors through which death comes and goes.” (...)

“Destroying painting” to make it into a painting to be seen starts with killing off that old (and not dead) distinction. Delprat does this profusely, unafraid to darken reason and its certainties. And yet she is not unreasonable. She is like a juicer, an ogre of limitless appetite. For her the encyclopaedic form is a way of fanning the forge of her art, in which the fire derives from the positive, poetic meaning of the verb “to forge”: to create and make. The metal that she fashions in the middle of her desert is extracted from paintings, films, reproductions, museums and Internet databases, and takes in the Julies Maciet collection at the Bibliothèque des Arts Décoratifs, DVDs, gardens in Florence and Rome, and the cafés of Pigalle. Delprat never talks about her painting. She is always out on the edge, on the lookout. Her choices are never gratuitous, they follow her taste, and the worst is always an eventuality, like anything else. Everything is classified. The delimited territory of the encyclopaedia grows richer by the day. The spirit is lively, incisive. The gaze incises, photocopies, scans, classifies. She then brings out a few of these pieces that are pieces no more for having lost their place of origin, once reproduction techniques have played their pandering role.

1 Le jeu lugubre d’Hélène Delprat, Dominique Païni, éditions galerie Christophe Gaillard, 2012
2 Fair is Foul and Foul is Fair, éditions galerie Christophe Gaillard, 2014
3 Orlando, Virginia Woolf, 1928
4 for France Culture : « Autour des enfants terribles », « Comment j’ai inventé Edith Scob » etc.