SPRMRKT is thrilled to present Diagonale du Fou, a solo exhibition by Ho Chi Minh City-based artist Sandrine Llouquet. Not immediately translatable, the show’s title refers to the various edges and planes of consciousness and reality that are connected through Llouquet’s non-linear, multi-layered, preternatural drawings — the ‘crazy diagonals’.
Sandrine Llouquet creates a personal syncretism that results from her in-depth reading and research into a multitude of schools of thought: from ancient Greek philosophy, Foucault, Nietzsche, Deleuze and Jung; the exploration of Alchemy; through to the study of religion and rituals, especially paganism and animism. Her work is “a marriage of the uncanny and the familiar” — as in Freud’s Das Unheimliche — with recognizable images from a variety of different sources, combined to create dream-like tableaux.
Llouquet explores ritual transformation and the transmutation of reality, which is composed of archetypal imagery. By juxtaposing known elements with strange and eerie surroundings, Llouquet, much in the same guise as a psychologist, hypnotist or guru, stimulates the deepest recesses of our unconscious and memory. Recurrent characters populate her scenes — faceless, masked, half-animal. Referencing myriad ritualistic and cultural traditions, the compositions exude an illusory higher knowledge of the world and of our place in the universe.
Sandrine Llouquet – Diagonale du Fou, 2012
Chinese ink, pencil & watercolour on paper, 56 x 76 cm
Diagonale du Fou by Sandrine Llouquet
29 September – 29 November 2016
SPRMRKT
2 McCallum Street
Singapore 069043
“Each of my artworks is a step left behind that shows the building of oneself: wandering, passage from one stage to another, rebellion, escape, rebirth… By pursuing my research on this idea of building oneself, I naturally came to study the history of alchemy and found deep similarities with my notion of art: a quest for wisdom that goes with material experimentations. Since then, the esoteric/hermetic dimension has kept growing in my practice while I interrogate the ideas of religion and ‘belief’.”
Born in 1975 in Montpellier, France, Sandrine Llouquet has lived in Vietnam since 2008. She graduated from École Pilote Internationale d’Art et de Recherche – Villa Arson in 1999. A dynamic contributor to the development of contemporary art in Vietnam, she was a founding member of Wonderful District, a project that promoted contemporary art through exhibitions, concerts and theatre pieces, as well as a member of Mogas Station, a Vietnam-based artist collective.
Llouquet’s work has been exhibited in numerous venues including the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, California and Tate Modern, London. She has also participated in a number of biennales with Mogas Station, such as the Shenzhen Biennale (2007), the Singapore Biennale (2006) and in Migration Addicts – a collateral event of the 52nd Venice Biennale. An ambitious new project is currently on show in KENPOKU Art 2016 in Ibaraki, Japan through to November 20, 2016.
