Jean-Michel Othoniel

Jean-Michel Othoniel is a contemporary artist born in 1964 in Saint-Etienne (France). He lives and works in Paris.

Contents

Biography

An artist who has a passion for all sorts of metamorphoses, sublimations and transmutations, Jean-Michel Othoniel has a predilection for materials with reversible properties. Othoniel first gained recognition with a series of sculptures made of sulfur, exhibited at Documenta IX in Kassel in 1992.

In 1993, Jean-Michel Othoniel introduced glass into his work and began to explore its properties. Transformations, mutations of materials, and rites of passage from one state to another echo an essential rite in the artist’s work: that of journeys and memory.

In 1994, he participated in the exhibition Féminin/Masculin at the Pompidou Center in Paris, with an installation entitled My Beautiful Closet, a mise-en-scène of dancers filmed in the darkness of a closet.

In 1996, Othoniel hung gigantic necklaces in the bamboo gardens of the Villa Medici in Rome, and later in the trees of the Venetian garden of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection (1997), and at the Alhambra and Generalife, in Granada (1999). Similar to a forbidden fruit, the necklace has a life in and of itself: it merges into the landscape and the leaves, like organic outgrowths absorbing shadows and diffracting light. The notion of wound or injury is at the heart of his work. In 1997, Othoniel created Collier Cicatrice, a small necklace made of red glass that the artist offers to whoever wants to wear it with pride.

In 2000, a century after Hector Guimard, Jean-Michel Othoniel transformed the Palais Royal-Musée du Louvre into the Kiosque des Noctambules: two crowns made of glass and aluminum conceal a bench designed for chance encounters in the sleepy city.

In 2003, Jean-Michel Othoniel conceived Crystal Palace for the Cartier Foundation in Paris and for MOCA in Miami. For Crystal Palace, he asked glassblowers in Venice and at Marseille’s CIRVA to create forms that would ultimately become enigmatic sculptures standing between jewelry, architecture and erotic objects.

In December 2004 in art, at the Théâtre de la Ville in Rochefort and later at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, Jean-Michel Othoniel staged Le Petit Théâtre de Peau d’Ane, an installation composed of four lacquered wooden sideboards, surmounted by thirty-five glass-filled models, and as many globes or huge vertugadins embroidered with gold and sequins. This installation was conceived as a decor for the tiny puppets that Pierre Loti used to play with as a child, and that Othoniel discovered in the house of this famous French writer.

Also in 2004, for the exhibition Contrepoint at the Louvre Museum, Jean-Michel Othoniel set his works in the museum’s spectacular Mesopotamian rooms. His monumental glass and aluminum sculptures, which are always created in relation to the places in which they are shown, acquire a timeless and peaceful dimension. The great white river of pearls adorned with nipples, which was purchased by the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, is now on view in the museum’s new collection display.

For the Unlimited Section at Art Basel 2005, Jean-Michel Othoniel showed The Boat of Tears in a pool located in front of the fair. The artist, whose works often combine the political and the intimate, salvaged a boat built by Cuban boat people and abandoned on the shores of Miami and used it as a basis for his work. A crown, chains and necklaces made of colored glass taper down into giant tears of clear crystal. The sculpture floats on the water like a ghost ship, loaded with tears of suffering and joy, overflowing with memories and covered by festive ornaments.

The artist has progressively built up a world based on ultimate freedom and the acceptance of the reversible, a world characterizing his personality. His work takes on a variety of forms: drawings, sculptures, photographs, narratives, choreography and video. His streamlined works are steeped in poetry and eroticism.

Public collections

Solo Shows

2008

2007

2006

2005

2004

2003

2002

2001

2000

1999

1998

1997

1996

1995

Cartier, Paris

1994

sur une table de dissection", (film-performance), ARC, musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France

1993

1992

chorégraphie de Daniel Larrieu, Marne-la-Vallée, France

1991

1990

1989

1988

Group exhibitions

2008

2007

2006

2005

2004

2003

2002

2001

2000

1999

1998

1997

1996

1995

1994

1993

1992

1991

1990

1989

1988

1987

Texts

What is glass? It is a transparency draped in reflections and stitched with metal, which the French artist Jean-Michel Othoniel, born in Saint-Étienne in 1964, has adopted as the leitmotif for his work since 1993. It’s a hard, breakable material, or, to use a more scientific language, an amorphous, non-crystalline solid, which achieves a vitreous transformation, formed of silica and a flux, and discovered at the dawn of human history in the sands of the Middle East. For the artist, it is both a signature and a territory: the secret garden of his fantasies, a wonderland through the looking glass. Contemporary artistic processes are always based on the obsessive repetition of a theme or visual motif, like the storyteller who constantly repeats the same seminal event, or the musician who eternally sings the same refrain in order to dissect the content, and to use all its resources. The disappearance—or perhaps merely the eclipse—of traditional genres during the twentieth century certainly ushered in a collective vacuum that was taken over, rather unscrupulous, by the play of individual follies. Othoniel seized on glass as if it were an abandoned, undeveloped plot containing a conceptual treasure. The characteristic of this material is that is appears on the end of the spectrum of scales, from miniature to monumental. Today, as in the past, manipulation of scale is one of the fundamental operations at work in artistic creation. By enlarging and reducing, by altering the interplay of sizes and formats, the world of art incorporates one of the great production methods for the extraordinary. It is also a time machine, as human life is itself characterized by the growth of an individual’s body. If glass as a material has a particular shape, it is certainly the sphere, expressed in multiple ways: the ball, the bead, the drop. As soon as we speak of beads in art, the origins of the Baroque esthetic appear on the horizon—because the term baroco initially designated a bead with irregular and subtly irrational shapes. What makes a bead interesting from the viewpoint of shape is its universal form as well as the wealth of worlds it evokes—the world of jewels, which we drape on the surface of bodies to embellish them, decorate them or ennoble them; the world of chandeliers and lavish decorations arranged in a space for similar purposes. By enlarging jewels and reducing monuments, Othoniel’s installations highlight the confusion of the body in its relationship to the outside world. A body too large or too small. Giant or childlike. We sometimes hesitate between the sacred and the profane in defining this esthetic, which echoes across past centuries marked by liturgical rituals and religious processions, but also by the law of desire and its cohort, of sentimental fantasies. A treasure, fairy tale, enchantment. But let’s go back to glass: preciosity, fragility, transparency. Glass filters light and color like the stained-glass windows of cathedrals or the industrial plastics placed in front of nightclub spotlights. And finally, sexuality: transparency evokes both the passivity of consent, the elegiac beauty of adornment, the sumptuousness of seduction. A false modesty, also reflected in the evanescent sensuality of the artist’s drawings and watercolors. Émile Soulier

References

  1. ^ The Forbidden (L'interdit) 1991 Jean-Michel Othoniel

External links