Sans existence symbolique

Name: Sans existence symbolique - Elise Nguyen Quoc
Brand: Keijiban
Price: 425.000000 EUR
Availability: InStock

Elise Nguyen Quoc

2025

Dry pigment on paper

Ca. 50 x 8.5 cm

Unframed

Edition of 12 copies, all unique, signed by the artist, plus 1 artist’s proof and 1 publisher’s proof

Only one copy left

Price: on request

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The edition

According to Elise Nguyen Quoc’s own terminology, this work presents itself as a residue. It is, in fact, the surplus of pigments produced for the making of Life’s driving force – psychic conflict, the painting exhibited at Keijiban, that determines the form and dimensions of the edition. As is customary in her practice, while preparing this painting the artist composed a color palette as faithful as possible to the digital extractions of tones found in her source photograph.

The selection of these colors is therefore anything but arbitrary. They originate from a real object, captured in the everyday, transposed into a photograph, digitally broken down and then reconstituted organically in the form of pigments. The almost scientific dimension of this process of decomposition and recomposition is reflected in the horizontal ordering and the subtle gradation of tonal variations. Yet the work also evokes the structure of a keyboard, where each mark corresponds to the span of a finger and each color to that of a note, awaiting activation. The work thus appears in a state of suspension, situated in an in-between space: between the reality from which it stems and the image still to come, between fact and interpretation, between memory and potential.

The artist

Elise Nguyen Quoc was born in Trappes (France). She lives in New York.

For several years, Elise Nguyen Quoc has grounded her practice in what she refers to as “remnants”: traces of the everyday that she photographs and collects, until one of them becomes the starting point for a new work. From the flow of life, she selects an often imperceptible detail and enlarges it to the very limits of the image’s resolution. After digitally extracting the full range of tones it contains, she recreates them as pigments in order to compose the broadest and most nuanced palette possible, initiating a slow and meticulous process of transfer.

From these microscopic fragments of reality emerge works that frequently expand to the scale of monumental paintings. These are large compositions with a subtle, velvety range of colors, where the vibrant pictorial texture serves as a perfect substitute for the depths of the material source it seeks to reproduce. Through this shift in scale and medium—this continual movement between reality and its image—the work ultimately resides beyond the readable or the recognizable.

In a way, the artist places us in the position of the famous character from Antonioni’s Blow-Up, who continually enlarges the detail of a photograph taken in a park in order to uncover the mystery of a possible crime inadvertently captured. By endlessly probing the image to find a meaning applicable to reality, it is the image that becomes the only conceivable reality. Here, too, the pursuit of interpretation gracefully dissolves, leaving space for the sheer beauty of the gesture.

Her work is represented by Gratin (New York).

The exhibition