What Remains of the Night: Hélène Labadie, Maxime Testu

In the world, everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it, there is no value, -

and if there were, it would be of no value.

- Ludwig Wittgenstein

*

If you're gonna be dumb, you gotta be tough

- Roger Alan Wade

“It is maybe only when we try to talk about it that it doesn’t work” Maxime says. In painting,

it can “maybe” work. We are looking at a series of paintings of objects. Objects that are

living a kind of crisis - they used to have a use, but are now decorative, more comfortable in a

painting than they would be in a contemporary household. Ceramic pots, jars, buckets, horse

carriages found in Normandie. In the later part of the same series, the objects stop referring to

things found in the real world. Stripes and squares cling to figuration within the shapes of

carpets, shirts, landscapes, jackets and shoes. A decorative impulse that can’t quite let itself

be. An exhibition titled “Une Pastorale” seems aware of it already being “over” for these

objects – for figuration, for romantics. Maxime insists that his awareness of this does not

mean that his paintings are a critique at all. That he is not interested in working from the kind

of remote perspective that it takes for his work to be a “comment”.

We talk about Gauguin’s loved/hated paintings of Tahiti. Clichés (literally) dressed up as

archetypes. One could say that the worst thing about those paintings is that he ever went to

Tahiti at all; that there is any kind of correspondence between the paintings and the world in

them. For Maxime the landscapes and pastorals are both clichés and archetypes. It is true, the

difference between an archetype and a cliché can in some cases only be felt. The dictionary

seems to agree that archetype is good and cliché is bad – still, words overlap in their various

definitions. “Recurring”/“repeating”, “universal”/“over-used”, “primordial”/“predictable”. Is

it “maybe only when we try to talk about it that it doesn’t work”? Good, bad, over-used and

predictable are, after all, value terms that have nothing to do in a world where “there is no

value”, where there can be no romantics. To know this. To paint inward. To not look for the

paintings in the world or in language, nor move towards abstraction, may seem impossible,

and dumb, or maybe, as long as we do not “try to talk about it”, like a (tough) way forward.

*To try to speak from the universe of the star in-between the quotes on the top of this page.

The universe of the slash that splits Archetype/Cliché. At times, things happen in real life feel

as if out of a movie. It’s like being robbed of the experience, and events appear in a kind of

meaningful light. A kind of pre-made movie-like common imaginary that briefly moves the

world where “everything is as it is and happens as it does happen” just beyond itself. This is

more or less how I remember the conversation with Heléne when we tried to talk about her

ceramics. Specifically, we were talking about a group of models of the inside of door locks.

She talked about a “narrative In-between quality".

This(lock)that. In the life size works there are doors and window shutters, she leaves you alone with these scenographic devices, somewhere between viewer and actor. If the power of films is the way they give the narrative quality of life a kind of clarity, then what is it that happens when you freeze these narratives in sculpture? Like the slash(/), Small scenes and shapes from a collected archive of cinematic screenshots and architectural details squeeze in between a before and after.

I often used to think about what our dreams would look like without films. The truth is

probably not that dreams look like films, but that films look like dreams. Hélène admits that

she has no specific interest in referencing cinema, but it is its ability to take rushes and edit

that she likes. To shoot first and ask questions later. In the small works, monochrome cars

and figures are caught in place. Sometimes the sculptures are made as if to accommodate a

specific camera movement or lighting. A man reading the newspaper. A panoramic view of a

massive bar scene. Cars zooming through a tunnel. Several sets of legs peeking out below a

Shutter. This game of scale, and the disappearance of figures when doors and shutters

become human scale, makes me miss the comfortable and sometimes funny overview that I

have over the dioramas.

I ask whether she has a specific nostalgic relationship to the movies she uses. She answers

that she is too young to have been born when most of the movies were made. Even if that

could be true, the sculptures happen before she knows why.

Charles Benjamin, 2026