House of Instruments

Press Release

Nicelle Beauchene Gallery is pleased to announce House of Instruments, the gallery’s second New York solo exhibition by Louise Despont.

In House of Instruments, Despont continues to explore drawing as abstract meditations, balancing and integrating symbols and forms to link her art to the inscription of narratives and to mystical or literary concerns. Employing and recasting a vocabulary of elements and constructions found within a set of architectural stencils and compasses, the artist renders her drawings on the pages of antique ledger books, with works ranging in scale from one panel to 24 panels.

Conceiving the exhibition during a year spent traveling in India on a Fulbright Fellowship, Despont has borrowed the geometries of Indian labyrinths, gardens, architecture, vessels and ancient Buddhist and Jain caves to offer balanced forms – particularly masculine and feminine principles—that engage past and present as indicators and provocations. While leaning towards strong poetic and lyrical translations, these drawings unlock a spatial perceptual field to reveal the formal qualities of surface, texture, scale and form.

While reinvesting introspection and the metaphysical into tropes of abstraction, Despont’s drawings are notable for their levels of sincerity, intricacy and refinement. Even in her larger works, the artist evokes an intimate experience with fine lines and subtle hatch marks revealing themselves only when viewed up close. The resulting works, charged with alternative legacies of cultural and personal, confront the binaries of abstraction and figuration through their encoded compositions.

Louise Despont received her BA in Art Semiotics at Brown University. She has participated in several group exhibitions including at the Hunterdon Art Museum, New Jersey; the Museum of Arts and Design, New York and Foxy Production, New York. Additionally, the artist will have solo exhibitions at IMO Projects, Copenhagen and Crévecoeur Gallery, Paris this coming year. Despont lives and works in New York City.