Hélène Duclos

The red necklace of the Valley of the Lillies Hélène Duclos Contemporary art

2025

Interview with Hélène Duclos Jean-Daniel Mohier – What were the first pictures that triggered deep emotions in you? Hélène Duclos – When I was a child the walls of my house were filled with my grandfather’s paintings, as well as my mother’s. They were very often landscapes. There was also a piece of lacquerware at my grandparents' on my father’s side. It had been brought back from what was then French Indochina, a country where my father’s family had lived for many years. This piece of lacquerware fascinated me somehow, with its dark red background and the golden junks sailing in the Ha Long bay. It is still a part of my memories. JDM – What happened between these first emotions and the time you decided you wanted to become an artist? HD – To become an artist… well, this is not a decision you make. The road is long, dangerous, demanding, and the desire to create something imposes itself on you in very diverse ways all along the way. There are crucial encounters, guides who opened the field of possibilities, like Anne Képéklian who was my teacher at l’école d’Art Appliqué Duperré. After I graduated I travelled and worked in several different fields while I was still working on my own art projects. JDM – You seem to have received a calling that sounds almost religious. HD – I feel I have received some sort of injunction, an order I cannot shy away from. Painting takes all the space, all my time, all my strengths on a very regular basis. It is not always easy to live like this, but it is the way I feel I can find the meaning of my existence; it is no doubt my way of feeling I am related to the world in some ways. JDM – It sounds vital for you. HD – Yes, it is vital. Painting is necessary to the heart, to the mind, to the soul, as much as food is necessary to the body. A world without poetry, without art, would be like an empty envelope, a dry and empty shell. JDM – It seems to me that freedom takes a very important place in your work. HD – Is it possible to call it freedom — the fact that I let painting lead me on in the space of the canvas as well as in time? — You can lose yourself playing that game: going deep down inside of you is painful and looking for your inner voice is risky. But at the same time, it is what artists, including painters, have to do: look the place over and make these remote territories visible. It is a privilege, a form of liberty that can become a weight at some point. JDM – Your works these days are made of a multitude of characters quite small as opposed to the scale of the canvas. Not to mention that you play with scales more in your new works.