HÉLOÏSE RIVAL: TAKICARDI

For her second exhibition at the gallery, Héloïse Rival (1990, lives and works in Paris) presents a new body of work that both extends and marks a decisive shift in her practice. Conceived on the scale of a total installation, the exhibition unfolds as an almost theatrical narrative, composed of a sequence of large-scale wall panels in glazed ceramic. The works are arranged like scenes from a tale, threaded through with an implicit moral. For Héloïse Rival, this narrative framework is not decorative; it forms the very foundation of her practice. The tale becomes a device she constructs in order to address, through the detour of fiction, the tensions of our time without resorting to direct illustration.

Héloïse Rival subtly draws on the imaginary world of Paul Grimault’s animated film The King and the Mockingbird [1], retaining its symbolic structure and political charge to develop, through the figure of the Shepherdess, a reflection on confinement, waiting, and the possibility of stepping outside an assigned role. In the story, the Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep are painted figures, trapped within the palace décor dominated by an authoritarian king. By leaving the frame, they cease to be decorative elements and become agents within the world. Rival adopts the symbolic force of this gesture: every form of confinement contains within itself the potential desire for freedom.

“The narrative becomes the theatre in which I choose to let my work coexist with a present shaped by tension. The tale is a poetic tool that allows me to address the conflicts of our time, a social mirror.” Héloïse Rival

The Shepherdess first appears as a female figure confined within her role, embedded in the architecture of the palace and merging with the surrounding décor. She embodies the king’s object of desire, that recurring figure of the vulnerable young girl. This image, repeatedly represented—from Manon des Sources to Hélène in Brassens’ song, to the Little Match Girl—runs through our collective imaginaries. The work, and this character in particular, opens the exhibition like a frontispiece, announcing the emancipation to come.

The very shape of the frames contributes to this tension. Their scalloped contours evoke the ornamentation of classical architecture, where the artwork is inscribed directly into the built structure. Alberti defined painting as a finestra aperta[2], an open window onto the world. Here, however, the opening acts as a device of fixation: it organises presence, assigns a place, stabilises a figure. The frame does not merely delimit the image; it organises bodies. To cross it is not a spectacular gesture but a gradual displacement, a slow disobedience that questions the limits of the artwork within a defined space.

Surface and figure are no longer separate but participate together in the construction of the image. This construction extends beyond the wall frame: the wall ceases to be a mere support as forms unfold down to the floor. The installation thus becomes a spatial device through which the viewer moves.

Painted in enamel and composed of assembled fragments, the works exist at the threshold between image and object. A vernacular material associated with domestic ornament, ceramic is here deployed for the first time on a large scale in Héloïse Rival’s practice. Rooted in the earth, it assumes the dimension of installation. Frames, motifs and ornaments no longer function as simple decoration; they structure the space and actively participate in the making of the image. By embracing this ornamental dimension, Héloïse Rival shifts traditional hierarchies of representation.

The exhibition Takicardi forms part of a broader inquiry within Rival’s practice, in which images are constructed from a rich imaginary nourished by stories and symbols. References coexist freely, without hierarchy or authority, allowing viewers to project their own associations. Meaning is therefore not imposed; it is shaped within this shared space, conceived to move beyond a singular point of view.

Paul Grimault (dir.), The King and the Mockingbird, screenplay by Jacques Prévert, France, 1980, 87 min.
Leon Battista Alberti, De pictura, 1435; French translation De la peinture, trans. Jean-Louis Schefer, Paris, Macula, 1992.