Interiors

The Kunstverein Nürnberg is proud to present Hélène Fauquet’s first institutional solo exhibition, Interiors. The show presents a new series of works in which found images of stained glass panes have been edited and UV-printed onto untreated wood boards. The repeated motifs are isolated  privacy windows, typically found in domestic housing. In their translucently printed form, the digital image reveals the permeable grain of the wood support upon which the glass composition is printed, thus visualizing the process of translation from one screen to another.

As an expression of taste, wealth, and status, the aesthetic of the stained glass window functions as a shield against the neighbor’s intrusive gaze. One panel carries traces of a domain name like digital debris. A hand appears in the lower corner of another, producing a form of presence within the otherwise disorientingly flattened crystalline space. That figure is absorbed into the shimmering fragmentary surface to produce non-communicative, partial, and anonymous reflection.

The panels’ spatial distribution and recurring central diagram generate a stuttering rhythm. The tightly cropped motif limits knowledge about what lies both beyond and in front of the windows, yet they remain markers of entangled states.

Once reversed onto itself, the printed surface becomes the site of projections and false promises. As a means of setting individual boundaries, these privacy windows allude to a visual economy of observation and reciprocal social control. The decorative boards pre-structure a libidinal interface between seeing and (not) being seen, a life and its audience. Through the prism of voyeurism and exhibitionism, the unwarranted reflection potentially culminates in paranoia, agoraphobia, or the weariness of performing a self.

Hélène Fauquet, b. 1989 in Saint-Saulve, F, lives and works in Vienna.