Paul Etienne Lincoln: Unrequited Euphoria — Paul Etienne Lincoln

Theta is delighted to present Unrequited Euphoria – The Enigma of Marie Taglioni, the gallery’s first solo exhibition with Paul Etienne Lincoln. The exhibition brings together the complete installation of The Enigma of Marie Taglioni (1982–84), an elaborate mechanical work first performed in 1983, alongside its original 16mm black-and-white film and various relics of the performance.

The origins of The Enigma of Marie Taglioni lie in a story inscribed within Joseph Cornell’s famed assemblage Taglioni’s Jewel Casket (1940), dedicated to the celebrated nineteenth-century ballerina. According to legend, in the winter of 1835, Taglioni’s carriage was stopped by a Russian highwayman who commanded her to dance for him upon a panther skin spread across the snow beneath the stars. Captivated by the memory of this strange and amorous encounter, Taglioni was said to have developed a ritual in later life of placing a small piece of ice among the jewels in her casket, allowing its gradual melting to evoke the atmosphere of that starlit winter night. Cornell gave material form to this imagined act of remembrance in his own jewel casket; four decades later, Lincoln would extend the legend through a mechanical performance, seeking to recreate not the encounter itself, but the atmospheric conditions through which its memory might be revived.

Lincoln’s work takes this ritual of remembrance as the premise for an intricate mechanical performance. On April 24, 1983, one year before the centenary of Taglioni’s death, two sculptural mechanisms representing the ballerina and the Highwayman were positioned in a shaded woodland clearing in Woldingham, England. Their operation was governed by the actual atmospheric conditions of the evening, with the precise conjunction of temperature, humidity, and diminishing light determining the moment at which the machinery would be brought to life. In a subtle way, the performance revisits the night told in the story, governed by the atmosphere, which is also used for its retrieval.

Over the course of thirty minutes, the Highwayman propelled seven small tablets of salt toward Marie, whose silk-covered vanes opened and closed to receive them. As the salt dissolved within her wax-lined stomach, an electrochemical process generated oxygen and chlorine, which was delivered to three oysters housed in a wine bottle, first feeding, and then preserving them. Through this improbable exchange, Lincoln transformed the imagined encounter into a system of courtship, chance, and biological sustenance. The machinery became a means of translating desire into physical processes, while the weather served as an invisible agent of remembrance. The installation presented at Theta brings together the dormant mechanisms of this singular performance with the work’s Memory Casket, on view in the large vitrine alongside a series of diagrammatic illustrations of the project’s internal operations. Designed to be unlocked and open autonomously only under atmospheric conditions matching those of the performance, the lead Memory Casket contains relics and a 16mm film documenting the 1983 event.

Also on view in the gallery’s second room is Halibat, an earlier mechanical sculpture that anticipates Lincoln’s interest in bodily systems and autonomous movement. Built around a spherical exoskeleton with exposed glands and endocrine structures, the sculpture moves in a crepuscular fashion, depositing a trail of pearls reminiscent of a snail tracing its path.

A new limited-edition pigment print relating to The Enigma of Marie Taglioni, produced in an edition of 30 + 3 artist’s proofs, will accompany the exhibition, along with a sixteen-page illustrated catalogue detailing the project.