„(...) Holt asked me if I wanted to drive with her to Malibu and watch the pelicans. What about them? I asked. They can’t land right, she said. We spent an entire afternoon watching the comedic creatures crash land while discussing what things were meant to be as opposed to what they actually were, and how one notion obscured the other. Hearing Holt talk about meaning as expectation, and hypothesizing that pelicans would land as gracefully as starlings if we lived in a world of language, made perfect sense (...)“ Vik Muniz, 2013

The exhibition at Société presents four large-scale paintings on soiled, unstretched canvases, each one obscurely marked with a single monumental letter or number. Resembling worn out signs, awnings or tarpaulins, Quentel’s paintings were first carefully handcrafted to then be purposely and repetitively maltreated. Choosing her home-studio in West Village and the large enamelled bathtub there as the centrestage, Quentel subjected her canvasses to a variety of afflictions: soaking, rubbing, tearing, gouging, tying, stitching and more. Completed, with faded coloring, they were unceremoniously hung on metal frames or wooden beams and equipped with own heavy-duty carrying bags, as if prepared for an impending mysterious adventure or a session of home bricolage. Although the artist vanished without trace in 1992, her work still lingers in the memory of the artists from that generation and beyond. ”For the young student I was, this tiny black-and-white photo represented New York, audacity, novelty, it had the flavor of first love. And this 3, what a mystery ... For a whole week, I wondered what it represented. When I was able to acquire this work, I was close to crying” recalled Takashi Murakami in an interview in 2016.