ariana papademetropoulos’show at Thaddaeus ropac paris
At Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Marais, Ariana Papademetropoulos provides Glass Slipper, her very first solo exhibit in France, on view until April 11th, 2026, where painting, sculpture, and setup liquify into one another. At its center sits Water Based Treatment, a livable aquarium populated by ‘kissing fish’, which welcomes visitors to go into a transparent enclosure ingrained within the structure and rest inside it. A sound work by Nicolas Godin, half of the music duo Air, audible just within the chamber, draws from 1970s ambient therapy recordings, separating noise while vision is filtered through water, glass, and the continuous movement of fish.
Around it, large-scale paintings phase unsteady encounters in between domestic interiors and unstable natural phenomena, while sculptural telephone booths and erupting microwaves extend the focus of the exhibition on unnoticeable forces and mediated experience.
all images courtesy of Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Marais, unless mentioned otherwise Water Based Treatment: the fish tank as affective gadget The layered condition of Ariana Papademetropoulos’ Water Based Treatment produces a subtle however consistent disorientation. The audience, normally outside the artwork, is placed within it, while the fish flow easily beyond
the enclosure. The LA-based artist gestures toward the idea of Umwelt, proposing that understanding is constantly partial and contingent. Suspended between environments, the visitor experiences a split sensory field where human-centered vision is destabilized, and alternative modes of picking up silently emerge.
The transparent limits of the aquarium remember the fairytale referrals of the exhibit at Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Marais, from Cinderella to Snow White, invoking objects that preserve and separate concurrently. Here, nevertheless, the visitor inhabits the position of the enclosed body, held within a state of suspension that is both regulated and uncertain.
Ariana Papademetropoulos, Glass Slipper, setup view, Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Marais, 2026 © Ariana Papademetropoulos|image by Nicolas Brasseur domestic space under pressure Throughout Glass Slipper, Papademetropoulos constructs interiors that appear simultaneously intimate and unpredictable. Chairs, textiles, and everyday objects are displaced into eruptive landscapes of lava, smoke, and climatic turbulence, where the reasoning of the home is surpassed by forces that surpass it. The lack of the human figure magnifies this effect: presence is implied through job, through items that seem recently abandoned or on the verge of change.
The exhibition unfolds as a series of thresholds. At its entryway, paintings of gowns framed in transparent dry-cleaning bags introduce styles of care, containment, and suspended identity. These images resonate with the fish tank’s own logic of enclosure, developing a connection between painting and setup.
On the upper floor, shell-shaped telephone booths modeled after those of the Tropicana Hotel in Las Vegas welcome visitors into recorded conversations between the artist and her psychic mediums. Nearby, paintings of microwaves caught mid-eruption visualize procedures that unfold beyond direct understanding, heat, pressure, and change consisted of within daily devices.
Throughout these works, Papademetropoulos draws loosely from concepts connected with Albert Einstein’s concept of ‘scary action at a distance’, locating invisible connections and postponed reactions within domestic area. Translucented the lens of the central fish tank, the entire exhibition starts to run as a fluid perceptual field.
Ariana Papademetropoulos provides Glass Slipper, her very first solo exhibition in France, on view up until April 11th, 2026 at the center of the exhibition sits Water Based Treatment