Positive Paradox: Héloïse Chassepot, Swetlana Heger

Opening 23.5. | 6 -10 pm

We are pleased to announce the upcoming dialogue exhibition Positive Paradox, featuring works by Heloise Chassepot (b. 1995, Paris) and Swetlana Heger (b. 1968, Brno), curated by Mitchell Anderson.

In the laboratory a positive paradox is the phenomena where the results of high accuracy tests are counterintuitive. Héloïse Chassepot and Swetlana Heger are artists separated by a full generation, yet their practices align contemporaneously in ways that also stagger presuppositions. They manipulate and merge expectation and desire, the heartfelt and the hollow; experiences “real”, digital and imagined. At the core of these new works, and in aspects of their wider practices, are explorations of and indulgences in the contradictions inherent in the beauties of culture and living. Like Stendal’s syndrome seamlessly coexisting alongside the syndromes named for Paris, Jerusalem, etc. - pleasure and beauty and disillusionment and weariness exist side by side, oscillating.

Ideas of attraction and desire here suggest and depict classical ideals, pastoral landmarks, stages of performance and symbols of mid romance. Though ranging and divergent in medium, the works of each straddle the painterly and digital from opposing corners. Heger uses an archive of vintage source materials and generative artificial intelligence as her palette, canvas and camera. Chassepot’s paintings, with their techno colors and frosty handling, nod to the machinal while her sculpture’s linearity seems transported from the screen directly into physical space. This cross pollination of forms and media results in works with an exuberance forming circular traps. Real feelings in the face of false experiences engage their opposites: earnestness, the genuine, the new. The visual is the conceptual, rotating through glamour and wonder and the skeptical. In each we find a carved out space for an authenticity of imitation. That it’s all less uncanny than arresting might feel like a paradox, testing positive all the same.