The centrepiece of Pauline Beaudemont’s project for the CARAVAN series at the Aargauer Kunsthaus is a multi-part video work whose main characters are snails with gold-painted shells. The artist has always had a fondness for these peculiar molluscs with their mobile dwelling and now devotes her most recent video work to them, while at the same time referencing the CARAVAN theme. On five vertically aligned monitors we see the snails leisurely crawling across canvases, with the marks they make in the process gradually giving rise to an abstract painting. Mounted closely to one another, the videos have the effect of paintings that change in slow-motion.

With the gold-painted snails Pauline Beaudemont refers to a scene from Joris-Karl Huysmans’ Fin-de-siècle novel A Rebours (Against Nature). Considered the "bible of decadence," Huysmans’ novel tells the story of the eccentric aristocrat, Jean Floressas Des Esseintes. A parable for the morbid aestheticism of the main character is the giant tortoise Des Esseintes adopts as decoration for his Persian carpet: he ends up adorning it with so much gold and gemstones that the weight causes the creature’s death. Pauline Beaudemont contrasts Des Esseintes’ ornate tortoise with the snails with gold-painted shells.

The video installation segues into a spatial intervention with which Pauline Beaudemont embeds herself in the collection galleries on the upper floor. With reference to the dandy, Des Esseintes, who surrounds himself with countless books and artworks, the artist creates a kind of salon of contemplation. In it she contrasts selected works from the collection with sculptural works of her own that appear to be sitting accommodations for viewing the works.

Much in Pauline Beaudemont’s installation — the dreamy atmosphere, the snail motif,  the unpredictability of the snails’ traces of "paint" as well as the selection of the works from the collection — points to the artist’s sustained interest in the dream-like, the subconscious, the cryptic and the surreal. Her work is about the "grey areas" of history and culture, about mavericks, curious occurrences, social and architectural utopias, cultural clashes and a host of other subjects.