Hélène Planquelle - Hold

Hélène Planquelle's work explores the delicate balance that unites pleasure and suffering in our relationship to the Other, from both an individual and a collective perspective, through recurring themes such as emotional dependence, attachment, vulnerability, acceptance and rejection, violence, and power dynamics.

Conceptual by nature, albeit very realistic, her work thus draws from a rich soil of philosophical and scientific references in fields ranging from ethics to social sciences, including attachment theories, psychoanalysis and evolutionary psychology. But Hélène Planquelle's approach is above all rooted in the ethical thought of French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, who notably used the concept of the "original violence" to describe our relation to the Other. The Other, in the vulnerability revealed by the nakedness of its "face", seems to command us with the primary imperative: "you shall not kill", thereby exerting an originary constraint on our otherwise sovereign existence.

A fervent defender of figuration, Hélène Planquelle's work is rooted in humanity's ancestral fascination with storytelling. Art is not so much a response as a certain way of posing questions; her works unfold in ambiguity, duality, and plurality of meanings.

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