For her first solo exhibition at Paulina Caspari, Hanna Rochereau presents 1st Floor, an installation that takes the logic of retail display as both subject and formal proposition. The point of departure is the department store floor: a space organised around the choreography of desire, where objects are elevated on podiums, arranged on tiered shelves, and lit to produce a particular atmosphere of value and longing. Rather than recreating these structures directly, Rochereau works from their absence. The exhibition stages what remains after the furniture and display-surfaces have been removed, the carpet marked by the outlines of display stands that are no longer there, their saturated silhouettes preserved against the surrounding fade. Embodying the illusion of what was as well as the fantasy of what could be.
The spatial premise draws on a scenographic tradition concerned with the trace as image. This arrangement proposes the gallery as a floor between floors, stripped of merchandise but not of the systems that once organised it.
Jess Cole describes the 1st Floor as “a shop without the wares. A gallery of space. Architecture divined in the strokes of a brush.” Her text, Levels, commissioned for the exhibition follows a figure through the experience of the department store from pavement to upper floor, tracking the passage from the sensory overload of the ground level to the comparative sparseness above, where signs begin to lose their function and objects their certainty.
