Hélène Delprat Cyclope, 1998

Cyclope is a gouache on paper mounted on wood. In the center of the work one sees a red demon or spirit painted in profile with two circles for feet, one of which looks startlingly like an eye. In front of the demon, another eye flies through the dark background. Thin white brushstrokes surround the demon, implying rapid forward motion.

This gouache was created at the end of the '90s, during Hélène's career hiatus, when she declared herself an "ex-French painter", without ever abandoning her pictorial practice, in particular through these small-format gouaches mounted on wood panels. As she states, "As I was doing other things, I was less caught up in painting all day, but I did a lot of small format gouache paintings: a daily journal, a book of hours." In the late aughts, she returned to her painting practice, which has since been shaped by an encyclopedic research process to accumulate a remarkable archive of sources, which have shaped her subsequent works.