The artistic practice of Rafaela Lopez (Paris, 1988) shifts between sculpture, video and co-curation projects. The ease with which she approaches these activities is the same ease that enables a process of humanization, which leads her to treat sculptures – the central figures of videos, actions, curatorial projects or personal objects – as though they were real characters. Her sculptures have a social life: they take part in a swimming competition with professional synchronized swimmers (Sculpture Synchronisée, 2014), they animate an archaeological museum (Les dieux des thermes, 2013); they are the special guests at a festive barbeque (Trivial BBQ, 2014); they talk about themselves (Etat d’âme, State of the Mind, 2015) or can be mute and stand out as objects in their own right, as they are sufficiently attractive to be an object of desire that everybody aspires to own. Bijoux de famille (pierre non-roulante) (2013) is a fake papier mâché stone, set with a huge number of bits and bobs belonging to the members of a family, as the summa of their affections. For Lopez, it is no longer just the handcrafted objects of traditional cultures, but also mundane items from daily life and mass consumption that have become veritable objects of affection, with the potential to achieve the status of a precious sculpture, despite their poor-quality workmanship.

In her film Etat d’âme, State of the Mind (2015) the artist sets in motion a mise en abyme of the process: it is the sculptures themselves which reflect upon art and its existence. The film’s central characters are a group of seven sculptures, in the process of taking shape, both materially and conceptually. The title itself, which consists of French and English phrases that are generally used to state the same things in both languages, but which have an ontologically different meaning, already tells us that the principle of variability represents the metaphysical essence of the work. The variation in language and meaning is supported by the stylistic choice to use the reality show structure – combining documentary, fiction and a logo in the shape of an infinite figure of eight, signifying balance; this allows the artist to project the spectator into a true television format, like a sculpture TV movie,
and allow the two states of the art to co-exist – the romantic and the analytical. And the notion of variability, in other words the tendency of art and the artist to manifest themselves in different ways, or rather with different methods, pervades all of her output, as an atmospheric phenomenon (Été Indien, 2014) or a migratory one (Voyage, voyage, 2013); it is like a sort of methodological "DIY" in which various strategies of research, typical of cultural studies, can meet and be combined together.

Text by Veronica Valentini

Rafaela Lopez • ART-O-RAMA collection • August 2016