HELENE LAUTH

Venue: Kyu Bunkafukusogakuin

Curator’s Text: Title :《ON GOING》

As part of the SARUYA Artist Residency, artist and designer Hélène LAUTH wandered around Fujiyoshida, looking at the forms adopted by beings and places, whether people, flowers, architecture, or landscapes. An extraordinary world emerges from the ordinary, whether traveling internationally from France to Japan or just wandering and walking about the city. Since 2011, Lauth has traveled regularly to Japan and says she feels both like a tourist and a resident, which has become a creative force in her work.
From her initial training at the school of fine arts in Bordeaux EBABX, she has retained the pleasure of practicing design and the plastic arts without hierarchy. Subsequent training in fashion design at the ESAA Duperré school in Paris led her to the fashion world at BLESS, and she worked for more than ten years as an iconographer, colorist, and print designer alongside Portuguese stylist Felipe Oliveira Baptista. However, she does not renounce her own plastic research, using all types of mediums and techniques—from drawing to photography, collage to video, ceramics to textiles, painting to installation—to make tools for observation as well as production.
In a systematic way, Lauth invites us to experience patterns as signs. She then uses drawings, photographs, and sound to document landscapes, urban constructions, and social practices. On observation, patterns stand out that she discerns through formal cutouts reinforced by flat colors or in the haphazard capture of a furtive glance or noise. These samples become signs taken out of context, and Lauth transports them to other media and offers them a new destiny. This connects them to artisanal and industrial know-how so that they may be used in service of art, be it textile print, drawing, collage, sculpture, theatrical scenery, or installation.

Text：Jeanne Quéheillard
Cooperation：Saruya Artist Residency, TENJIN FACTORY, GEN MAEDA & CO., LTD., watanabe textile

Artist Profile: HELENE LAUTH
Born in 1982. Artist Designer. Studied Fine Art at the School of Fine Arts in Bordeaux and Fashion Design at the Duperré School of Applied Arts in Paris. From 2011 to 2021, she worked as an iconographer, colorist and print designer at Lacoste and KENZO under Creative Director Felipe Oliveira Baptista. From 2009 to 2012, she was invited to art residences and exhibitions by the cities of Artigues-près-Bordeaux and Bergerac, and received a special prize for her installation work Cocoon (Artigues-près-Bordeaux, 2007)