dreamlike aquarium invites visitors to lie within at thaddaeus ropac

ariana papademetropoulos’ show at Thaddaeus ropac paris

At Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Marais, Ariana Papademetropoulos presents Glass Slipper, her first solo exhibition in France, on view until April 11th, 2026, where painting, sculpture, and installation dissolve into one another. At its center sits Water Based Treatment, an inhabitable aquarium populated by ‘kissing fish’, which invites visitors to enter a transparent enclosure embedded within the structure and lie down inside it. A sound work by Nicolas Godin, half of the music duo Air, audible only within the chamber, draws from 1970s ambient therapy recordings, isolating sound while vision is filtered through water, glass, and the continuous movement of fish.

Around it, large-scale paintings stage unstable encounters between domestic interiors and volatile natural phenomena, while sculptural telephone booths and erupting microwaves extend the focus of the exhibition on invisible forces and mediated experience.

all images courtesy of Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Marais, unless stated otherwise

Water Based Treatment: the aquarium as perceptual device

The layered condition of Ariana Papademetropoulos’ Water Based Treatment produces a subtle but persistent disorientation. The viewer, typically outside the artwork, is placed within it, while the fish circulate freely beyond the enclosure.

The LA-based artist gestures toward the concept of Umwelt, proposing that perception is always partial and contingent. Suspended between environments, the visitor experiences a split sensory field where human-centered vision is destabilized, and alternative modes of sensing quietly emerge.

The transparent boundaries of the aquarium recall the fairytale references of the exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Marais, from Cinderella to Snow White, invoking objects that preserve and isolate simultaneously. Here, however, the visitor occupies the position of the enclosed body, held within a state of suspension that is both controlled and ambiguous.

Ariana Papademetropoulos, Glass Slipper, installation view, Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Marais, 2026 © Ariana Papademetropoulos | image by Nicolas Brasseur

domestic space under pressure

Throughout Glass Slipper, Papademetropoulos constructs interiors that appear at once intimate and volatile. Chairs, textiles, and everyday objects are displaced into eruptive landscapes of lava, smoke, and atmospheric turbulence, where the logic of the home is overtaken by forces that exceed it. The absence of the human figure intensifies this effect: presence is implied through vacancy, through objects that seem recently abandoned or on the verge of transformation.

The exhibition unfolds as a sequence of thresholds. At its entrance, paintings of dresses encased in transparent dry-cleaning bags introduce themes of care, containment, and suspended identity. These images resonate with the aquarium’s own logic of enclosure, establishing a continuity between painting and installation.

On the upper floor, shell-shaped telephone booths modeled after those of the Tropicana Hotel in Las Vegas invite visitors into recorded conversations between the artist and her psychic mediums. Nearby, paintings of microwaves caught mid-eruption visualize processes that unfold beyond direct perception, heat, pressure, and transformation contained within everyday devices.

Across these works, Papademetropoulos draws loosely from ideas associated with Albert Einstein’s notion of ‘spooky action at a distance’, locating invisible connections and delayed reactions within domestic space. Seen through the lens of the central aquarium, the entire exhibition begins to operate as a fluid perceptual field.

Ariana Papademetropoulos presents Glass Slipper, her first solo exhibition in France, on view until April 11th, 2026