Herald St

Elise Nguyen Quoc

sous ultra-vide

Herald St | 2 Herald St, London, E2 6JT

24 September – 7 November

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Herald St is delighted to present Elise Nguyen Quoc: sous ultra-vide, the Paris-based, French artist’s first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom. The exhibition brings together new works incorporating acrylic, paper, pigment, ballpen, graphite, dry pigment and resin on wood and wood panel. Blurring the boundaries between painting and drawing, these works depict what Nguyen Quoc describes as “remnants”: traces of visual and physical encounters that she experiences, notices and photographs, before reproducing them through different techniques.

In her practice, Nguyen Quoc seeks to restore materiality to overlooked and elusive traces observed in daily life, which she describes as “remnants” or “leftovers”. She carefully photographs these encounters before reproducing them with different techniques. “I take photos of fragments which dwell at the periphery of a big subject, caught within the flow of time: human or non-human marks that I think have the potential to become an inscription,” Nguyen Quoc explains, describing her interest in drawing attention to otherwise overlooked encounters connected to both her life and artistic practice – be it the residue left in an empty paint tray or friction marks at the entrance to her apartment. “My practice is grounded in chance and the everyday: not in ideas; doing, wandering, cooking, cleaning, discarding… It is from these ordinary acts of life that my work emerges. No exalted genius here – I invent nothing,” she continues.

The French title sous ultra-vide refers to a state of ultra-high vacuum: a condition of exceptionally low pressure in which so few particles remain that they can travel vast distances without encountering one another. Such conditions can be artificially reproduced using machines that remove almost all particles from a space, creating environments sufficiently empty for highly precise scientific observation and experimentation. Nguyen Quoc is interested in why we seek to create such emptiness: in the possibility that absence might allow us to better understand reality, while also providing the conditions through which new realities can be forged. Her interest also lies in the instability of emptiness itself – how what appears empty to one person may not be empty to another, and how spaces seemingly devoid of matter might nevertheless remain charged with traces, encounters and possibility.

Lining the entire length of the main gallery and raised just above the polished concrete floor, Ralentissement du chant des oiseaux [Slowing down of birdsong] (2026), is among Nguyen Quoc’s largest works to date. The work continues a series in which ballpoint pens are directly applied to wood panels – here blue, red, and black. On close inspection, the densely accumulated gestures of biro become visible, built up through repeated hand movements from left to right working with the panels horizontal, parallel to the ground. Each work is scaled to the span of the artist’s outstretched arms, with elements subsequently removed by hand-sanding. The resulting compositions appear to reference post-war abstraction and Colour Field painting; however, they are in fact representational. This work, for instance, continues from the making of an earlier large-scale ballpoint pen work, during which the artist’s arms left friction-induced traces on the underside of its stretcher as she worked. It is an example of the way Nguyen Quoc’s works evolve in succession, with residues from earlier works informing encounters that, in turn, spark new moments of significance and new images. Through the hand-driven process of repetition involved in producing this large-scale work, Nguyen Quoc’s body moves almost automatically and unconsciously, arriving at an extremely dense and multifaceted composition: at once resembling rays of light, muddied tracks, signals and impulses, and both micro- and macro-elements of the cosmos.

Also on view are examples of Nguyen Quoc’s works in dry pigment and graphite powder, such as Pas le mot juste [Not the right word] and Sous ultra-vide (both 2026). With these materials, she can pay much closer attention to colour than in her biro works, which are limited to fixed, standardised tones. Her Drawings series records the process of finding the precise pigments used in her dry pigment works: swatch-like mixtures of blues, greys and blacks, framed in Plexibox. This search for colour is among the lengthiest processes in her practice and is important to Nguyen Quoc as a way of revealing to viewers how she actually works. “The way I work is part of the work,” she reiterates. More than simply offering a behind-the-scenes glimpse, these works make visible an almost ethical commitment to process – akin to opening the door of her studio to the viewer. For Nguyen Quoc, every stage involved in making a work is as significant as its final form. Reflecting on her own interest in the work of other artists, Elise recalls that it was equally important for her to learn about their habits and studio processes: whether they worked alone or with assistants, and the particular conditions through which their work came into being.

“My works testify to the gap between living reality and its frozen image, where I surrender myself to my perceptual tools, to that sensitive and archaic instrument that is the body,” says Nguyen Quoc, continuing, “To transcribe an image is to change its mode of existence. It is to render perceptible the experience of making, where time is no longer capital but becomes the sign of a lived duration… To track, to scent, to follow a footprint or flattened grass, belongs to a fundamental mode of attention in the formation of human gestures. The body anticipates, translates and adapts; these operational chains, born from the demands of survival, persist in the way we enter into relation with the world. To reproduce a trace is to prolong this gesture, not by interpreting a sign but by taking up a trajectory again, by inscribing one’s own body into the continuity of a previous movement, of what remains of it.”

Elise Nguyen Quoc (b. Trappes, FR) lives and works in Paris, FR. In 2023, Nguyen Quoc received her MFA with honors from Beaux-Arts de Paris. Prior to that, she graduated with honors from Villa Arson and completed an exchange program at Kyoto City University of Arts in 2022. In 2024, a book on her practice, titled Offering body and soul to a radical alterity, was published by Gratin and included essays by Katia Leonelli and Elise Nguyen Quoc. Recent exhibitions include Despite the teacher’s threats and the jeers of child prodigies, Gratin, New York, US (solo, 2026); Elise Nguyen Quoc, Keijiban, Kanazawa, Japan (solo, 2025–26); and Brink, Herald St, London, UK (group, 2025–26).

– Text by Laurie Barron

My drawing practice takes place within an infra-linguistic dimension of the ‘sign’, that is to say, founded on the recognition of traces, movements and intensities. Through this reading of the world, it is a matter of considering ‘signs’ before they are transformed into constructed and ordered language or into clearly identifiable representation.

This question of representation is crucial in my work, in the literal sense of making present and beyond the opposition between abstraction and figuration to which painting and drawing are often reduced. I attempt to question the language of drawing itself, and the way we represent the world, by questioning this language. Drawing does not begin with the representation of an object, as in verbal language, where a word corresponds to a thing, but is already present in perceptible relations between interruptions, densities, repetitions, displacements, rhythm…

From gestures come traces, from traces come signs and eventually figures. Ralentissement du chant des oiseaux [Slowing down of birdsong] (2026) makes the simultaneous coexistence of these states perceptible, through and by means of lines that form figures without ever themselves becoming figures. The colours of the work are not arbitrary. When I stopped using only black ballpoint pens on my panel works and began introducing blue and red, one of my collectors told me that he did not like them, that he found them “kitsch”. I think there is something in bright, primary colors, reproduced through mass industrial production, that conflicts with certain norms of “good taste”: a kind of implicit hierarchy between colours and an assignment of roles to them (decorative or not, attractive or not). For me, beyond the fact that they create a certain discomfort, they belong to a collective memory of ordinary gestures: corrected schoolwork, notebooks, forms and annotations, for instance. In short, these are colours associated with standardised writing, without smudges or blots, without a beginning or an end to the stroke. Usually contained within the reduced scale of the page, the applied colours are displaced onto standard-sized panels (250 × 122 cm), and leave behind their function as a tool for producing information to become the marker of a lived duration.

My corpus of images comes from things that were never intended to be drawn. Remnants, accidents, peripheral or clandestine fragments of larger subjects that I photograph and then reproduce by hand in the posture of a copyist. This practice of reproduction in turn leaves traces around me, witnesses to the practice through which I work, which I incorporate on the same level as everything else.

La transparence des langues [Language transparency] (2026) emerges from the same origin. For several weeks, a wooden board bearing traces of white acrylic had been lying on the floor, left fallow: a failed and abandoned attempt. Then, while preparing the support for another work and after applying my paper to the surface, I cut away the edges that extended beyond the format. The thin strip of paper was sticky with glue, so I got rid of it by throwing it onto the wooden board to avoid dirtying the floor of my studio. It landed and adhered exactly as it appears in the work, physically taking up the suspended trajectory of one of the traces of acrylic previously inscribed there, a kind of bi-temporality, bi-dimensionality. The excess paper appeared to me both as the material representation of a vanished state of matter and as the vestigial sign of a gesture of production, further blurring the distinction between what produces the work and what constitutes the work.

Absolument pas [Absolutely not] (2026) belongs to a body of work that likewise developed from discarded materials that triggered a renewed process of inscription, without any recourse to an image. Positioned above the frames, I sketch a gesture in the air akin to writing. The traces of acrylic are deposited onto the surface, dry, and become markers: a type of Braille in which my hand retraces its path and literalises these traces with small ballpoint bars, like Tom Thumb leaving markers to find his way back.

Drawing 3, 4 and 5 (all 2026) are the palettes produced while I was seeking chromatic accuracy in reproducing the colours digitally extracted from the image that served as the iconographic source for Fabrication fiction (2026). I wanted to make it perceptible to the viewer that the integrity of my images is guaranteed by adherence to an operative procedure. The ethics of making, the ritual-protocol, creates a language in which each action is developed and regulated according to this single guiding principle. Each drawing carries within it sensory details as indices of its reality and, through its qualities, possesses an autonomy of its own.

The different visible techniques in the exhibition are not stylistic effects. They are tactical responses to the iconographic questions posed to me by the images. In order to reproduce what I photograph, I have to project myself into matter – to make use of a technical subconscious that cannot be formulated in clear terms, to identify my capacities for action and adapt them according to what I perceive in my image.

Anyone wishing to further explore my relationship to copying and the image can read the text accompanying my most recent exhibition on the Contemporary Art Library website.

– Text by Elise Nguyen Quoc