Aire de repos

At the outset, there is cutting and folding, two gestures that link surface and volume. Folded and unfolded like pop-ups, Renaud Helena’s sculptures are capable of disappearing and reappearing. The pieces, assembled with hinges, reproduce the process of cutting and folding a sheet of paper. Here, the medium used gives to the volumes stability while retaining the flexibility of paper.

From the cutting of a surface emerge forms that unfold in space, engaging the viewer in the process of constructing the works to develop their meaning. The shapes open up for the duration of an exhibition. But the artist allows the volumes to rest on their own weight. Then, what makes up the image collapses, as if to signal a tension with the gravity of reality. The cut-out surfaces articulate and settle against a wall or on the floor, thus generating new formal configurations in their repose.

The elements evoke an architecture without identity, found in intermediate spaces such as rest areas, defined solely by their function as places of transit. For the artist, these spaces reveal a lack of experience — like the series of portraits that literally show the absence of a face, created from casts from which he extracts a mask, a second skin, flattened, cut out, removed.

Renaud Helena’s works possess an aesthetic marked by a banality that reveals the flaws of these anonymous public spaces, their limits and edges as so many possibilities for access and exit. So behind the surface, we can trace new paths, a troubled move into imaginariess.