Artist: Caroline Mesquita
Exhibition title: CuCO & CO
Venue: HAB Galerie, Nantes, France
Date: May 17 – September 29, 2024
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and HAB Galerie, Nantes
Caroline Mesquita creates human-sized environments where visitors encounter sculptures resembling humans, humanoids, animals, machines, and other objects.
With great artistic freedom, Mesquita uses different metals, which she cuts, twists, rolls, and welds together. The various metals (brass, copper, stainless steel, or steel) are then collected and their raw surfaces blackened, burnished, oxidized, brushed, or chiselled. Unlike classical ways of showing sculptures, her cheerful and mischievous environments endow them with a great potential for fiction and imagination.
Geometric and anthropomorphic shapes, animal and mechanical figures, ritual objects, and archaeological finds, disaster scenes and dance parties – all of them populate these fixed tableaux, which then take on new life in stop- motion videos where Mesquita engages with the jerkily animated sculptures, taking on multiple identities. By occupying the HAB Galerie, Mesquita continues to explore the possibilities of a sculpture’s life in a metallic landscape made up of numerous metallic and hybrid surprises.
