The Plant Life of Saints

Press Release

Nicelle Beauchene Gallery is pleased to announce its inaugural exhibition with drawings, animations and sculpture by Louise Despont. This will be the artist’s first solo show.

Inspired by Emma Kunz, a self-described healer and researcher, Despont creates shapes and forms expressed through rhythms, measurements, and a sparse sense of geometry against the ruled sheets of antique ledger pages. Despont’s lyrical translation of color and value through the use of symbols, inkblots and outbursts of scratched lines creates a platform where formalism, abstraction and minimalism intermingle. The drawings, acting as points of departure into the practice of telepathy, prophecy and contemplation, echo and reflect the functionality of Indian Tantric drawings. Theoretical as they are, the drawings allude to the conditions and capacities of the mind.

The drawings are further activated in the film ‘Experiments in Moving Drawings, Parts I &II’ as they become deconstructed and collaged together in an animation set to a soundtrack of broken instrument percussions and found sounds. The interplay, repetitions and changes in motif within the emblematic space of the drawings create a deftly luminous landscape with strange and mysterious forms gathering energy and momentum around them. Compositions of stacked patterns, floating symbols and fanned characters appear encoded in data with subtle forces at work behind each piece.

Concerned with evocations of a forgotten past and the tangles of memory, Despont creates sculptural assemblages that connect the aged ledger books with various fragments and relics. Evoking the interests of a collector or social anthropologist, Despont combines elements from a range of found and archival materials in a somber alchemy that reveals both formal and mystical interconnections.

Louise Despont received her BA in Art Semiotics at Brown University. Her work has been featured at film festivals internationally. Despont currently lives and works in New York City