ON A WINTER AFTERNOON this past February, sunlight flooded a third-floor gallery in Manhattan’s Chinatown, alighting on the extra-large rhinestones and metallic roses that adorned a few of the nearly one hundred kitschy mass-market photo frames that were on display. These intimately scaled, eclectic objects—which gave the impression of having been hand-picked over several years of weekend shopping in sundry antiques stores and junk shops—were distributed across nine office tables. The frames held photos of soap bubbles, in dusky blues and spectral silvers, which were either clustered together like viruses under a microscope’s lens or captured as lone specimens, as though they were close-ups of blank, rounded faces.
Altogether, these elements constituted Hélène Fauquet ’s first US solo show at Ulrik . In the evening, warmer columns of light crept menacingly over the works from the windows looking out to Canal Street, where assortments of knockoff and discount commodities were gathered, like the frames, for the public’s delectation. As the shadows lengthened, however, horrors unfolded across Fauquet’s multiplicity of forms.
It takes audacity for someone to follow an idiosyncratic obsession to its logical conclusion. Occasionally, one can pinpoint the moment when an artist makes that leap in their own practice, reorienting themself toward a singular pursuit. Consider how Mondrian’s 1911 encounter with Cubist paintings catalyzed his turn from Impressionistic l.
