Hélène Delprat – Vous êtes en train de m’enregistrer ?, 2024

Painter, video artist, set designer and indeed blogger, Hélène Delprat draws inspiration from literature, film, radio, the press and the Internet to create a protean body of work that combines fiction, documentary, tragedy and comedy. Whatever the medium, the artist works on a basis of “fortuitous affinities” and begins the process with a collage of images. Her work is permeated by questions of representation, transmission and recording; it involves an abundance of cultural and popular references, figurative and conceptual associations that defy any single interpretation.

Blending painting, sound and video, Hélène Delprat’s installation Vous êtes en train de m’enregistrer ? (“Are you recording me?”) reveals a host of sources of inspiration. The video W.O.R.K.S & D.A.Y.S is conceived as a sort of commonplace book in which poetry, popular songs and weather. The huge painting, entitled La voix / Premier Ministre de la Mort (“The voice / Prime Minister of Death”), represents the sound-wave of French actress, producer and director Nicole Stéphane’s voice and traces the “courage, spirit of resistance, humility and humour” she displayed in her wartime involvement in the French Resistance, in her performance in Jean-Pierre Melville’s Les Enfants terribles (“The Terrible Children”) and her short scientific film on early brain surgery. With accompanying audio recordings, Hélène Delprat’s “canvases with a message” combine quotations from books and extracts from interviews, interweaving the artist’s own voice with the voices of Nicole Stéphane, Edith Scob and actor Jean-Louis Trintignant.