Second Homes

from September to November 2014

Caroline Mesquita

Born in 1989 in Brest. Lives and works in Paris. A graduate of the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts de Paris.

Caroline Mesquita creates sculptures that touch on both questions regarding the relationships between an artwork and its context of presentation, and on the boundaries between an object, its form and its functionality.

The artist’s recent sculptures are made of forged and twisted steel tubes, forming a kind of sketch in space traced by a single gesture. The line snakes along, breaking up and punctuating its host space, becoming indissociable from it. It runs through the space, as though to contain or re-qualify it. However, far from limiting herself only to interventions on and within space, the work of Caroline Mesquita also strives to test the evocative and narrative potential of objects. With the steel tubes, pieces of wood, or copper plates, she thus produces refined versions of a stool, a coat stand, a barbecue, or a blind, to which caps, dresses or coats are added here and there. This community of objects with simplified forms introduces a deictic form of narration related to our domestic spaces.

Borrowing as much from Minimalist Art as from 1970s design, Caroline Mesquita’s works continually cause us to sway between what they describe and what they evoke, between the physical space that they occupy and the emptiness that they denote, between the meanings of habitual practices in reality and the fictions that inevitably arise from the pared-down evocation of these familiar environments.