Hélène Delprat Fausse déclaration II, 2023

Fausse déclaration II is a mixed media painting consisting of pigment, acrylic binder, glitter, and collage on canvas. It consists of a background of multicolored thinly painted lines that at places intersect one another, and a foreground with large text and a small printed still. The text states “I DECLARE I AM NOT A WHITE EUROPEAN FEMALE ARTIST” in all-capital letters. The still features a shackled woman clutching onto a suited figure.

The image mounted on the painting is a still from Ishiro Honda's film Invasion of Astro-Monster (1965), from the Godzilla franchise, which the artist has infiltrated by pasting her portrait on top of the body of one of the protagonists. The film is a B-movie, reflecting the frequent mixing of the pure and the impure in Delprat's work: what is in good taste and what is in bad, what is irritating or admirable, cultured or not at all. Without any hierarchy, good and bad taste combine in stylistic opposition, reflecting the artist's taste for the anomalous, the monstrous and the intrusion of disruptive elements.

Delprat often uses text in her works, either in the form of found phrases that she has read in the news or heard on the radio, or in the form of declarations that she has written herself, as in this painting. Contrary to today's injunction to define oneself above all by gender, skin color or origin, Hélène Delprat doesn't consider herself to be "just" a woman artist, and through this gesture, the work is placed at the center of the discourse (and not its author). For the artist, anonymous works are of particular interest. They are free from categorization, free from community, free from identity.