Back to Hélène Delprat’s work at the Maeght Foundation

Saint-Paul-de-Vence. Hélène Delprat entered the Maeght gallery in 1985, after her residence at the Villa Medici. The exhibition opens up to one of the works made in Rome, Ulysses and Calypso (1983). A strange meeting between The dream (1910) of the Rousseau customs officer and a more expressionist spirit. A colorful, hedonist and joyful work on the one hand, dark, agitated, disturbing on the other. Two facets of the same person who in the hands of the exhibition commissioner, Laurence Bertrand Dorléac, leaves the spectator the possibility of playing with the pretenses.

The commissioner, however historian, went from the chronology to enter the work in a more sensitive way. Perhaps also because the chronology of Hélène Delprat’s work is complex. In 1995, she left her trails by fraying with radio, theater and video, without abandoning painting.

The works presented covered the period 1983-2024. In each room, a text guides the visitor without knocking him with gossip. The first, “the whole arsenal of painting”, is a self -portrait of the artist, highlighting his universe, his pictorial “cuisine”. The visitor discovers a canvas almost 10 meters long – The battle of San Romano camouflaged (2018) (see illustration). Hélène Delprat here joins those who confronted the masterpiece of Paolo Uccello. She creates a dance as macabre as jubilant. In front, Self -portrait in nasty painter And Catastrophic self -portrait (2024) light up with relevance the painter’s method: dreamlike, irony, borrowed from modernity, collage … a painting nourished by the history of art without being citation, like Hello Mr. Courbet (2019). Further on, all the gouaches on paper (1992-1999) introduces language. Titles, Rotten portrait ; Hell And Good French tastetranslate all the artist’s ambivalence in the face of his painting, the painter’s permanent doubts about his work.

The “Leak” section shows works whose darkness illustrates the gravity and duality of Hélène Delprat. So With my Voice, I’m calling you (2016) is populated by ghosts, slugs and/or threatening black snakes. The “Les Amazons” section echoes the present time, notably the rise of nationalisms in Europe. If Delprat’s work is strongly marked by dreamlike, it is not cut from today’s real. The winged characters are armed, some already deceased. An Iberian mask summons The Demoiselles d’Avignonbut should we not rather read a reference to Guernica, And in war?

The penultimate room operates a return to the past, the works of the beginnings (1982-1983) are thus presented at the end of the course. These are paintings of great freedom. The brush blows are expressionist, lively and numerous, the shimmering colors. These works evoke both the fauvism and the universe of Ernest Ludwig Kirchner. Nourished by mythological stories, they differ from those presented in the first and last room of the exhibition. These voluntarily adorned with glitter play with the idea of ​​good and bad taste-that attributed to popular culture. Finally, Person (2024), self -portrait of the artist, closes the course. The exhibition can be traveled in both directions, starting with the exit.