Statement

Renaud Héléna's work features a visual vocabulary consisting of cut-outs, molds, texts and games. The pieces, sometimes supporting one another, recreate precarious installations using notions of structure and surface. The artist plays with games and theater codes to set up a "weak magic" and blur the line between reality and fiction. His work evokes us a mean-dering space within the fantastic and mundane where normative structure and marginal behavior overlap. On the one hand, Héléna translates ordinary architectural elements and street furniture into fragile pop-up sculptures cut according to a principle, which links the volumes to their spatial planes, leaving them leaning on structures or simply lying flat on the floor. They form fragments of landscapes somewhere between set design and architecture, which are both familiar and strange. His participation in the collective's lab session is "opening new perspective on my experimentation around scuplture and scenography". Along with this, Héléna writes texts suggesting cinematographic fragments or protocol's testimonies taking various forms like internet forums, recipes, mind maps, where he plays with the common place and generic dimension found in langage. "Once the scenery collapses and truth momentarily becomes false, words wander. Then, hollow conversations and witches' recipes of love potions may remain where authenticity has left."