Ophelia Jacarini: movement and body memory

With “En Mouvement”, H.D Galerie presents Ophelia Jacarini’s work for the first time in France. A sensitive exhibition expressed as a cross between painting, sculpture and installation, it explores the body, the trace and the disappearance of gesture.

Held at H.D Galerie in Paris, the “En Mouvement” exhibition marks Ophelia Jacarini’s return to France after eleven years of exile in Asia. The show brings together two series, Identity and Métaphysique du mouvement, around the same obsession: making visible what escapes the eye (but not that of the synesthete artist). Time, momentum, the body’s memory and even the disappearance of gesture become tangible matter under Ophelia’s talent. With this exhibition, Ophelia Jacarini proposes a poetic reading of movement. Her aim is not to represent the body, but to capture what it leaves behind.

Ophelia’s career began with ballet, which she practiced from 1995 to 2014. At the age of ten, after seeing a Maurice Béjart piece at the Palais des Congrès, she felt the desire to stop time. This revelation underpins her entire approach: retaining movements that disappear at the very moment they are born. Trained as a stylist at the Atelier Chardon Savard, while attending the Beaux-Arts in Paris, she developed a language between the body, textiles and the plastic arts. Her outsize canvases are made from her old pattern-making fabrics. In 2013, she travels to Asia to study minority costumes, before settling in Hong Kong in 2014.

Since 2017, her work has unfolded through residencies and exhibitions, notably at the CICA Museum in South Korea and the Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town. Between figuration and abstraction, Ophelia Jacarini builds a delicate body of work (no less wild in aspect), inhabited by dance, time and memory.

In Motion
H.D Galerie
45, rue Vivienne, Paris 2
Until June 5, 2026