Caroline Mesquita: The Ballad

Curator: Martha Kirszenbaum

Caroline Mesquita’s (b. 1989 in Brest, France, lives and works in Paris) sculptural practice intertwines the materiality of her altered, oxidized, and painted copper and brass sheets with theatrical playfulness. Her metallurgic experiments result in life-size figures, interacting with each other in a mise-en-scène crafted from the sculpted sheets and forming an environment of coated steel. For the exhibition The Ballad presented at Fondation Ricard, Mesquita produced a series of 12 sculpted characters interacting and facing each other or the viewer as their presence blurs the line between fiction and reality, humans and mannequins. It is a procession, a form of public celebration, a moment of communion.

There is a distinctive boldness in Caroline Mesquita’s gesture and approach to the material and the object, as she transforms rough pieces of metal into a sophisticated ensemble of colored sculptures forming a joyful parade of dancing souls. The structure of the exhibition parcours is framed by large pieces of dark gray steel with shimmering reflections figuring a sidewall, a wing and jet engines of a dislocated plane, as if it had crashed in a faraway desert zone, providing the metal characters—perhaps the plane’s passengers—a backdrop or a playground made of its leftover fragments. In the video produced for the exhibition and titled The Ballad (2017), Mesquita appears alongside her sculptures and the interaction she creates pushes the limits and reinvents ways of living together. Masquerading as a myriad of characters with diverse costumes and makeup experimentation, whether personifying a pilot officer, a teenager with braces or an elegant Gothic woman, she seems to challenge our understanding of identity construction, human representation, and to convey a particularly ambiguous relationship to her works, oscillating between tenderness and violence, love and vice. As her sculptures cuddle and caress her, then attack and wound her, the soundscape of the video—metallic jingling and clinking—gives the impression of a deliciously perverse carnival.

A second opus of the project will open at 221A in Vancouver in April 2017.

Caroline Mesquita graduated from École Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 2013. Solo exhibitions include Pink everywhere, Kunstverein Langenhagen, Germany ; Jupiter Artland, Edinburgh, Scotland; Les Bains-Douches, Les Bains-Douches, Alençon, France, 2014, and Tube, 1m3, Lausanne, Switzerland, 2013. Group exhibitions include Europe, Europe, Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo, Norway, 2014; The Space Between Us, Fahrenheit, Los Angeles, 2014; Memory Palaces, Carlier-Gebauer, Berlin, 2014; La Vie Matérielle, 15ème Prix Fondation Ricard, Paris, 2013; Rob Pruitt’s Flea Market, Monnaie de Paris, Paris, 2012. Mesquita attended the Mountain School of Arts in Los Angeles in the spring of 2014.  

She is represented by the galleries carlier | gebauer, Berlin and Union Pacific, London.