Eléonore False

Eléonore False was born in 1987, and she lives and works in Paris.

I seek to conceive of public space as an externalization of what is intimate to me. I try to merge social practices (ritual and cultural) that I associate with the archived images I select (whether magical, symbolic, or symptomatic) with my own rituals, linked to my memory, my pleasure, my era, and its specific social relationship to images.

I extract, I cut, I incise, I separate, I enlarge, I reduce, I fold, I disrupt the images I take by mutilating and dismembering them. I suddenly take them out of their context to make them converse with my practice. It is through these means of appropriation that I give a form of life back to the images. These archives, I choose them from different periods. It could be a fragment of an advertisement image, where the graceful and delicate gesture—similar to the movement of a dancer—appears to me as a fleeting and maternal memory. It could also be archives of kouros, idealized beauty from Greek antiquities, whose faces transform, like fresh flesh, into materials for my practice. I re-contextualize and re-spatialize another sensitive body through surgical gestures on paper. The relationship of the body to the exhibition space is essential and is revealed by this reactivation of these archival documents.
Once turned to black and white, these images symbolically lose part of their historical specificity, their differences fade, and they unify. The pieces designed in the studio then come to be placed in the exhibition space, searching for their place. To settle, they borrow from the spatial register of the decorative (chromatic motifs on the walls, choice of arrangement of the pieces) and the grotesque (which, through humor, humanizes them) and allow them to be perceptible, while remaining autonomous.
These pieces, I made them in the intimacy of the fictions I create. My work is populated with phantasmagorias, which, once stated, lose their magic. I try to objectify in the exhibition space my way of being in the world, understanding it, and being affected by it, not only by the multitude of images of our time but also by the rituals they evoke in me.

Eléonore False graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris (atelier P2F). In 2012, she spent several months at the Fundaçao Alvarez Armando Penteado in São Paulo, Brazil. She has participated in several exhibitions, including in France and Brazil, such as Groom at the Hôtel du Lutétia and Tanto Faz? at the Fidalga space, São Paulo. Recently, the collective exhibition “Deux temps, trois mouvements” (curated by the About Blank collective) was accompanied by a publication from Éditions des Beaux-Arts de Paris.