Le plaisir dans la confusion des frontières
The solo exhibition of Emmanuelle Lainé brings the artist back to Paris – a place very familiar to her.
She will revisit the city and the gallery spaces of the Fondation Ricard, where she has shown in the past, through an ambitious in-situ exhibition. The project, developed on location over a period of three weeks, and involving a multi-talented team, will turn the exhibition space into the artist’s studio. It is common in the practice that she incorporates her immediate surroundings. During this time, Lainé will assemble materials she finds in the hosting institution itself, and from other sources that she may come across. She employs the visual language of everyday paraphernalia and standardised objects from supermarkets, IKEA, or second hand stores in a way that leaves space for accidents and coincidences. All of this shows her interest in highlighting the moment when things take shape in an unexpected manner rather than meticulously controlling the outcome.
The way Lainé arranges found objects and personal things and combines them with new works she makes on site, reflect a profound affiliation with classical sculpture. But there are also other artistic genres that resonate in the work, such as the still life or landscape painting. The artist employs photography for very specific spatial effects. She documents the process of the exhibition space turned artist’s studio in order to create large, 1:1 scaled reproductions of different scenes and applies them to the walls in the gallery. This creates a complex and highly performative optical environment that generates both physical disorientation as well as an exceptionally organic coalescence with the installation. Not least the title of the exhibition, which translated into “taking pleasure in the confusion of borders”, emphasises this blurring of perception.
