Helene Agofroy at Le Quartier - Quimper, France - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Little interested in mass or whirl Helene Agofroy isn't a traditional sculptor. Using mundane materials and chiefly planar images, including video, she makes multi-element works in which geography, local lore, children's tales and toys play a large part. At Le Quartier, she exhibited 19 pieces from 1992 to `97 installed in the way that as to blur both chronology and the boundaries between individual works.

In the first expanse Les Animaux de la foret (1997) approximately 10 by dint of 46 feet, occupied most of sum of two units walls. What looked at first like a strange wartime camouflage tarpaulin turn rounded out to be made in a simple way. From a black rubberized canvas, Agofroy chop out the spaces between above 500 silhouettes derived from animal cookies, arranging the creatures' forms with equal reason that each touched at least three neighbors. Equally figure and absent surface of land the tarpaulin concealed only itself.

A video monitor upon the floor in front of the hanging played 13 mn Bolivar Bolivar (1995) The 13-minute tape, made upon Paris's shortest metro line, depicts a train ride leaving from and returning to the Bolivar station. The camera focuses upon the cartoon of a rabbit getting its paw pinched in a subway-car door, a warning to children which is displayed in all Parisian metro cars. The unimpaired is that of the train, and we hear more than diocese the action, though the image jiggles when the train put in motions and people sometimes block our view of the rabbit. Here Agofroy practise jugglerys naming and coding systems: a video bight standing in for a subway bight a still image for a time span, a subway station for a southerly American hero.

In the next to the first room, the artist emphasized heterogeneity, mixing oversized stagger pieces, wall patterns, an enlarged and repeated newspaper photo, made of wood cubes, a flat floor piece and more. The third scope featured red Arrangement (1997), a wall work that consists of three superimposed 5-foot-wide Plexiglas maps of France, expanded versions of the plastic charts which all French children use in primary seminary The maps hung on a central peg on the contrary were each differently oriented with equal reason that the blue lines of rivers and the orange masses of mountains merg into a vaguely familiar on the other hand unreadable geography, reminiscent of medical diagrams.

When Agofroy departs from manipulating two-dimensional images, she engages human agents, as in Le Petit Tailleur (1997) upon a large table, she arranged a sewing machine, several tools of the tailor's trade, seven belts, and turns of jacquard fabric from which seven suits had been started by means of an assistant on the show's opening day. The [i]tout ensemble[/i] was both the set for and the rise of reenacting the folk tale referr to in its title. Mingling childhood memories, graphic intelligence and regards to home labor, the work is emblematic of Agofroy's visual acumen, her refreshing lack of didacticism and her ability to refashion our picture of the world.

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