Hélène Fauquet

Hélène Fauquet seeks in her work to examine and reflect on the gap that the medium of photography leaves between the object and the photograph of an object. Her focus here is on an artificiality that appears more real than what’s actually real, visible, and invisible. She seeks to create the “immersive image.”

In her installation Phenomena, Fauquet works with associative and actual elements borrowed from Dario Argento’s film Phenomena (1985), which portrays an inhomogeneous and dreamlike space dominated by criminality and secrets. Argento’s films are marked by a certain auratic exigency, in which reality is invariably enigmatic and its governing laws appear like signs of a large-scale conspiracy. In this world, there is a certain indifference toward the relationship of cause and effect. Here phenomenological perception is hyper-sensitized, addressing in particular the existence of the paranormal through optical and acoustic shifts that influence the reality of the protagonists. Phenomena was filmed mainly in Switzerland (around Säntis, Lake Zurich), hence visual similarities and impressions to the surrounds of the canton of Glarus arise when obse

rving the scenery. The film also references the 1984 exhibition Phänomena at the Zürichhorn, which sought to awaken a new and deeper understanding of the basic rules of nature through its presentation of uncommon natural phenomena and cybernetic experiments.

In another translation of her ideas, Fauquet works with images connected to processes of commercialization, like those used in producing marketing images for perfumes or other luxury products. Her manipulated representations of “drops” and “bubbles” create new constellations of images whose appearance as unidentifiable forms presents abstract concepts of beauty, transparency, or youth. A “drop” is also roughly the equivalent of an optical device through which we can see, but which filters our perception at the same time. The presenting of the “beautiful” image and its manipulation is conflated with an allusion to the paranormal, in the evocation of visible and invisible forces and the ultimate strangeness that comes from it.

With Phenomena, Hélène Fauquet questions how viewers take in visual information and how this information “sits” within a system of objects.