Elsa-Louise Manceaux

Pequod Co. presents Qualities’ Times, the first exhibition in the gallery of Elsa-Louise Manceaux (Paris, 1985).

History as a discipline has been concerned with studying the political, economic and social conditions that have defined successive eras. A much more recent branch is the history of sensibilities, as developed in a recent publication by Alain Corbin and Hervé Mazurel. It incorporates sociology and psychology and encompasses a wide spectrum ranging from the historical study of perceptions to that of feelings and passions. It analyses how the senses – how we see, listen, touch, smell, love and even cry – evolve over time.

Under this premise, this exhibition is the response of Elsa-Louise Manceaux (Paris, 1985) to a dizzying “now”, which calls for new definitions, concepts and structures that give meaning to our present, particularly in the face of the profound social, cultural, affective and even planetary changes that we are going through. The series of paintings in this exhibition are articulated under the idea of Qualities’ Times. With this concept the artist is proposing to discuss, not without humor, the changes in sensibilities over time and the qualities of our present. Manceaux experiments with various techniques and surfaces to address the contemporary transformation of emotional life and the imaginaries that this produces: brightness, nuances, “raw” cotton and linen canvases, molded imprints of varying thickness, acrylic, egg-tempera (the ancestor of oil paint), and silverpoint (the ancestor of graphite), among others. She invites us to deconstruct the idea that the formal aspects of painting lack content, asking: “Doesn't painting serve as a marker, through the evolution of pictorial qualities, techniques and inventions, to point to the evolution of our visual sensibilities, inevitably linked to the social realm?”

At this moment in which a state of uncertainty is perceived linked to innumerable transitions, Manceaux shows three paintings in the main space that show couples through the ages, from ancient times with the petrified remains of “The lovers of Pompeii”, to the Middle Ages with a couple in a profane relationship, and a contemporary heterosexual couple in crisis. In the second room, she confronts us with subtle aspects of the now, qualities related to sound, speeches and changes in language through the appearance of mouths in her paintings and the sculpture of a sofa, pointing at the effect that this has on the psyche of the individual. The desire for aspects such as luminosity, the need to open intimacy to the public sphere and the desire for political and sexual emancipation become pictorial motifs of the series. They become predominant in her first Radio Painting, which synthesizes Manceaux's exploration of the discursive and sensory elements of our present. ‘The Power of the Fragile’ places us in the artist’s workshop while she draws, listens, absorbs, and interprets a podcast by France Culture in February 2023, Le Temps du debat, episode of Les termes du débat: émancipation [ “Time for Debate”, episode “The Terms of the debate: emancipation” ].

This exhibition shows us how sensitivity is not only an individual and subjective process, but one that functions as a filter for the collective interpretation of the world. The fact that the very word “quality” – from the Latin “qualitas” – originally meant “Way of being” is not a coincidence. If our affectivity is modified, can we modify our relationships with the world’s beings? Can painting emancipate itself? And beyond, can the gaze emancipate itself? ‍

— Andrea Valencia, curator.