engaging with the conflicting experience of interior life, In her first exhibition at the gallery since 2017, Henrot premieres a series of paintings and bronzes, non-verbal and pre-lingual expression and the shapes of things before they exist. With a series of paintings from the series ‘Soon’ (2022), first developed in drawings from 2018-2019, Henrot was inspired by sonogram imagery. Sonograms are images produced with sound frequency. Like a shape-shifting mysterious Rorscharch test, they reveal more about the person viewing them than they do about the forms themselves. They may trigger our desires, anxieties, fears or certain memories. Henrot’s water-soaked canvases imply that the viewer relies on their own capacity for interpretation. Considering Henrot’s long standing exploration of hybrid figures–neither human nor animal, male nor female–bodies in perpetual flux–it is no surprise that with ‘Soon’, Henrot turns to the form of the fetus, in all of its prelingual, predefined state of becoming.    With ‘Dos and Don’ts’ (2021-2022), Henrot collages text excerpts from books on etiquette or ‘savoir vivre.’ As an exterior manifestation of an internal voice, social codes and behaviors can be experienced as both benevolent and threatening in nature. On the one hand, etiquette books operate to facilitate lines of communication, guiding the translation of social codes from one group to another. The fact that they were originally published in book form by the upper class would suggest that their authors aimed to democratize this brand of non-verbal ‘know how.’ On the other hand, these soft orders deliver the anxiety of failure on a silver platter. They are very often soaked in a conservative prejudice, especially concerning gender and class. Some of the phrases– how to select the right wine, what to wear, how to pack one’s luggage for a weekend trip versus a longer vacation–were selected by Henrot for their comforting voice; as if they were suggestions given by a “good” parent. But just like our relationship with authority or parental figures, these words are much more complicated. We feel hopeful for the promise of acceptance and are simultaneously destined to disappoint. These unsaid, assumed demands exist from the beginning–we are born into them. They are the water we swim in.    Spread across the exhibition are five bronzes from the series ‘Je Coupe’ (2022). In various assemblages of cut apple slices, sections and knives, the works are titled successively Je Coupe 1, Je Coupe 2, Je Coupe 3, Je Coupe 4, Je Coupe 5. The sculptures refer to the concept of growth, the counting of numbers (Henrot recalls using apples to learn how to count at a young age), and also to the classic image of a still life. In their sliced state, the fruit reveals the seeds it contains. The presence of a knife next to the fruit would reasonably imply the destruction of its integrity, but it also suggests an act of care. One would typically only use a knife to cut an apple if it is going to be shared–otherwise it would be bitten. The apple–one of the most common, banal, but symbolically charged objects in Western society–is in this case dissected from its own classical representation and projected into the conditions imposed by the digital age: questions around visibility and transparency, fertility, proliferation and reproduction, growth and consumption.    In the back room of the gallery, a series of sun-exposed black felt curtains exhibit the basic process and meaning of photography: ‘to draw with light’. The curtains–which covered the windows of the artist’s former Paris home for 10 years–are transformed by UV light. Henrot’s exhibition, enveloped by the scenographic intervention of layers of torn wallpaper by architecture and design firm Charlap Hyman and Herrero, suggests the passage of time - the impression of a domestic space in transition. Rips upon rips reveal caricatures of cigarettes, sperm or sweat and asemic writing–an imitation of text without the smallest unit of meaning.   The title of the exhibition, ‘Le vers dans le fruit’–a play on the expression ‘Le ver est dans le fruit’, or ‘the worm in the apple’–refers to the beginning of a decline or something that is about to be corrupted. Le ‘vers’, in its stated spelling, refers to a verse or a phrase. What words do we hear when we are not yet born? What is our relationship with language when we are not yet able to speak?