Paris Internationale

For the 12th edition of Paris Internationale, Pequod Co. presents a project featuring works by Elsa-Louise Manceaux and Andrew Roberts. The selection brings together two distinct bodies of work that share a common concern in the construction of narratives in the present: how they are edited, how they take shape, and how they circulate.

Manceaux presents a canvas and two diptychs; whose surface features a technique ofembossed in gesso and raw canvas that the artist has been developing for several years, exploring the relationship between background, covering, information, and material. Drawing on the themes explored in her solo exhibition "Voice Notes" at the Museo Jumex, the artist approaches painting as a system for recording and translating contemporary experiences. Her panels function as platforms where textures, ghostly signs, and structures characteristic of the digital sensibility converge—a way of inhabiting the pictorial medium through lived experiences and relationships.

Roberts presents sculptural bodies with the uncertain consistency of artificial things:creatures, mechanisms, and remnants of toys that conceal miniature animated worldswithin themselves. Once opened, they reveal characters engaged in small rituals ofcompanionship, affection, and everyday life. Drawing from the logic of transforming toys, theimmersive atmospheres of shoegaze, and digital animation, Roberts constructs narrativesthat oscillate between the grotesque, the absurd, and the intimate. Their unfolding invitesviewers into scenes that feel both strangely familiar and unsettlingly private.

The booth thus serves as a space where Roberts’ speculative fiction and Manceaux’s documentary sensibility come into dialogue. At this intersection, both practices converge in an interest in what might be understood as a form of digital craftsmanship, revealing images that function as traces of technical processes operating on their own—something that insists on appearing, though never in its entirety.