HÉLÈNE JANICOT

2022 RUBIS MÉCÉNAT PRIZE

IN PARTNERSHIP WITH BEAUX-ARTS DE PARIS
ST. EUSTACHE CHURCH, PARIS

Hélène Janicot was born in 1999, she lives and works in Paris. She entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2018 and has been working since then in workshops where she develops a plastic expression covering several mediums; volume, drawing, writing, video. The rigidity of the materials (stone, metal) is matched by performative actions whose movement gives rhythm to the space. She obtained her DNAP with honors in 2021 and will graduate next year. In her work, she gives a preponderant place to the spatialization and temporality of her pieces. Their relativistic nature takes up the idea of a mental architecture that unfolds at multiple scales. She is passionate about cognitive biases, which bring into play memory and the ability to anticipate, in short, those mechanisms that allow the mind to venture into the field of abstraction. This space of projection can be translated, as here, in installations involving magnetic fields or the laws of physics. The whole answers each other in a quest for balance.

CARTE BLANCHE

Hélène Janicot is the 2022 winner of the Rubis Mécénat Prize in partnership with Beaux-Arts de Paris, which offers emerging artists from the school the chance to create an original installation for the church of Saint-Eustache. Working with curator Audrey Illouz, she presented a three-station installation in autumn 2022.

Hélène Janicot’s project for St. Eustache Church is structured around three artworks. The first, Temple Pulse, opens the exhibition and tests the force of attraction. Hélène Janicot redesigns the octagonal structure of the church’s pillars by means of metal wires that run vertically. The whole is interrupted by an infra-thin gap that opens at the height of the head and is maintained by the presence of tensioned magnets.. A second station, (Lifts), offers a completely different relationship of scale: a transparent slab reveals a hole. Reminiscent of an archaeological dig, the hole also refers to the beginning and the fall of bodies. In the Sacré-Coeur chapel, she proposes a final work, Métaflexion, and takes the imprints of her own kneeling body in the concrete. With this first in situ project, the artist addresses the very essence of the place through a series of refined but tense gestures, and invites us to a physical and sensitive experience that sets the body and mind in motion.