My work features a visual vocabulary consisting of cut-outs, molds, texts and interactive flash animations. The pieces, supporting sometimes one another, recreate a precarious universe using notions of structure and surface. Caught in a world between the fantastic and mundane, my work evokes a meandering space where dominant culture and marginal behavior overlap.
I translate ordinary architectural elements and street furniture into surfaces cut according to a principle which links the volumes to their spatial planes. I create castings molded in crêpe paper or paper maché. They form fragments of landscapes somewhere between set design and architecture which are both familiar and strange, impossible to situate in time and space.
I explore writing beyond the constraints of the narrative, which takes on various forms like internet forums, recipes, mind maps, etc.. I try to push the possibilities of language to their limits until the experience of reality is reduced to a series of commonplaces. I create vector drawings that are assembled into flash games. Through coded and predefined interactions, the player explores a virtual space which mixes the everyday and the exceptional, the public and the private.
Once the scenery collapses and truth momentarily becomes false, words wander. Then, hollow conversations and recipes of witches' love potions may remain where it has been abandoned by authenticity.
Renaud Héléna
