A work from the immersive exhibition designed by students from the Beaux-Arts de Paris at Espace Niemeyer engages with the architecture to offer a sensory and poetic experience around love and the memory of the place.
A Love Envelop in Plywood , Installation - Utipin plywood, 2026 The concrete walls of Espace Niemeyer bear the imprint of the wood used to make them. On each surface, the grain, lines, and knots of this wood are visible. It is from these traces that her plywood installation emerges, coming to rest against, envelop, and follow the curve of the wall. Its title is inspired by the video by American artist Tom Sachs titled A love letter to plywood (2012), a poetic ode to plywood and its making. This concrete, which forms the foundation and framework of this space, had to be poured into a structure made of wooden formwork in order to exist. The wood made its creation and formation possible. Its perceptible remains on the facade bear witness to its role in bringing the concrete into being, to its devotion, as if it had given it shelter, a home, an envelope. Helena Fourmont was born in Paris in 2000, graduated from the Beaux Arts de Paris in 2025 with jury honors, and is continuing her training in the Art en Situation et Fresque program. At the boundary between painting and engraving, she explores and reveals the hidden, inner life of certain materials, such as industrial wood and, more recently, plaster through the fresco technique. She works by subtracting material and reveals, in pieces she calls scratchings, certain traces such as those of a tree’s life through its knots found beneath the surface. In 2024, during her exchange at Kyoto City University of Arts in Japan, she received a grant from the Fondation Malatier-Jacquet. In 2025, she showed her work in the exhibition “Log Ladies” at Galerie Chapelle XIV, took part in the 22nd Biennale de Gravure de Sarcelles, and then in the exhibition of honored graduates at the Beaux Arts de Paris. An immersive exhibition designed by students from the Beaux-Arts de Paris at Espace Niemeyer engages with the architecture to offer a sensory and poetic experience around love and the memory of the place. A project co-produced as part of an educational partnership with the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris, with the participation of Espace Niemeyer.
Source: paris.fr — photo: © Helena Fourmont, 2025, Nœuds ! (Zoom)