Hélène Planquelle

Hélène Planquelle is a contemporary figurative painter who explores the delicate balance between bliss and misery in our encounters with others, from a both intimate and universal point of view, tackling recurrent topics like emotional dependence, attachment, social need, vulnerability, acceptance and rejection, power and violence. Hélène Planquelle is a self-taught artist, and she owes her wide range of knowledge and interests to her humanity studies. After pursuing her passion for classical literature and philosophy, she opened her mind to always more contemporary topics in the realms of social and natural sciences. A fierce advocate of figuration, her work draws on man's ancestral need for storytelling. Conceptual in nature, her work draws on a wide range of philosophical and scholarly references, from ethics to cognitive sciences, attachment theories and evolutionist psychology. The figures of victim and torturer originally ingrained in our encounter with the other bring her to explore extreme physical activities like sadomasochist practices or combat sports as graphic sources of inspiration. Imbued with a deliberate dramatic quality, Hélène Planquelle's work ultimately looks to sublimate the raw nature of the experiences she touches on to help us make sense of our most individual sorrows she embeds in a broader story, that of humankind.