Elene Latchkepiani
''What has already happened''
LC QUEISSER hosted by Galerie Derouillon, Haut Marais, Paris.
LC Queisser is pleased to present the solo exhibition '‘What has already happened'’ by Elene Latchkepiani hosted by Galerie Derouillon, Haut Marais, Paris.
38 rue Notre Dame de Nazareth, 75003 Paris.
The show reimagines destruction as a powerful and generative force, exploring how materials-whether cement, oil paint, or burned plexiglass-transform through unpredictable interactions. The exhibition embraces flux, rejecting the notion of stability and permanence in favor of process and change. Through intuitive, site-specific sculptures, the artist invites us to witness the continual shaping of form, where destruction is not a loss but a vital part of transformation and becoming. The work challenges traditional ideas of truth and essence, positioning material change as the true site of meaning and creation.
Elene Latchkepiani
Untitled, 2025
Oil on canvas, wall paint, iodine, plaster, burned plastic bag
65 ¾ × 73 ⅝ inches
In Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), René Descartes reflects on a piece of wax: “the taste is eliminated, the smell evaporates, the color changes, the shape is lost.”1
Despite these transformations, he argues, reason alone allows us to recognize it as the same substance. This notion – that material change is secondary to abstract knowledge – assumes a stable essence beneath transformation. But what if destruction does not reveal a deeper truth, but instead resists the very idea of permanence?
Elene Latchkepiani’s practice challenges this assumption, treating transformation not to uncover an underlying reality, but as the work itself. In her sculptures, materials – plaster, oil paint, burned wood, carved marble, and melted plexiglass – exist in a state of flux, shaped by forces of destruction and reconfiguration. Breaking down is not an endpoint but a generative process, where materials continuously shift and reform.
Sculptural assemblages reject fixed meaning, embracing instability instead. Burned surfaces, fractured edges, and altered textures reveal matter in motion. These materials do not return to an original state; rather, they exist in cycles of becoming, where destruction asserts presence over absence.
In the show, the artist assembled sculptural elements and found objects directly in the exhibition space, responding intuitively to their inherent qualities and interactions. Rather than constructing a predetermined order, her approach invites unpredictability, allowing meaning to emerge through material encounters.
Latchkepiani resists the idea that transformation must be understood through abstraction or detached observation. Instead, it foregrounds the immediacy of physical engagement – where the instability of materials mirrors the shifting nature of perception itself.
1 René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. John Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 20.
