Elise Nguyen Quoc: sous ultra-vide

Herald St is delighted to present Elise Nguyen Quoc: sous ultra-vide, the Paris-based, French artist’s first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom. The exhibition brings together new works incorporating acrylic, paper, pigment, ballpen, graphite, dry pigment and resin on wood and wood panel. Blurring the boundaries between painting and drawing, these works depict what Nguyen Quoc describes as “remnants”: traces of visual and physical encounters that she experiences, notices and photographs, before reproducing them through different techniques.

In her practice, Nguyen Quoc seeks to restore materiality to overlooked and elusive traces observed in daily life, which she describes as “remnants” or “leftovers”. She carefully photographs these encounters before reproducing them with different techniques. “I take photos of fragments which dwell at the periphery of a big subject, caught within the flow of time: human or non-human marks that I think have the potential to become an inscription,” Nguyen Quoc explains, describing her interest in drawing attention to otherwise overlooked encounters connected to both her life and artistic practice – be it the residue left in an empty paint tray or friction marks at the entrance to her apartment. “My practice is grounded in chance and the everyday: not in ideas; doing, wandering, cooking, cleaning, discarding… It is from these ordinary acts of life that my work emerges. No exalted genius here – I invent nothing,” she continues.