ART CITIES:Paris-Jean Michel Othoniel
Jean-Michel Othoniel shows a fondness for materials with reversible properties. He started out, at the beginning of the 1990s, with works made out of wax or sulfur, showing them at the Kassel documenta by 1992. A turning point in his career came following year when he began employing glass exploring the properties of a material that subsequently became a hallmark of his work.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Perrotin Gallery Archive
Jean-Michel Othoniel in his solo exhibition “Oracles” brings together 15 minimalistic, enigmatic sculptures made of glass or metal bricks, the artist has systematized the use of a module that entered his work in 2009, after a journey to India. In this trip to Jean-Michel Othoniel was struck by the stacks of bricks accumulated in the hope of building a house and by the countless altars covered in offerings and multicolored necklaces. A modular element (like the glass beads that have been his hallmark since 1993) brick has led Jean-Michel Othoniel towards more refined and radical works, somewhere between sculpture and architecture. In brick, the artist has found a universal element, a common denominator between cultures and one that has traversed the history of humanity. Feeding his latest research and generating material for new ‘obsessions’, brick enables him to reach the architectural scale he was aiming for and to try out cantilevered constructions, to go beyond the idea of sculpture, to invent a new relation to space, to rethink the embedding in the landscape, to radicalize his relation to geometry or to create places – grottoes, paths, walls, agoras – that set out a different relationship to the body, thereby synthesizing the recurrent themes of his oeuvre. The exhibition marks a new turning point in the artist’s career, bringing together works that are more solemn but no less poetic for all that, like “Blue River” (2019), a landscape of monochrome pixels, the work sees its surface rise as movement is arrested and time suspended in the expectation of a constant renewal, between the birth of a wave and the fall of a pyramid, between appearance and disappearance, construction and collapse. This dual feeling of emergence and cave-in recurs in “Icebergs” (2019), a series of stainless-steel reliefs that outline an imaginary and shifting cartography on the walls. “There is a strong oracular aspect to my work. There is something intuitive in my works, but also of the order of revelation. Artists have a powerful intuition” he says, as he evokes his series of “Oracles” (2019), linear modules of amber, yellow and grey bricks. Consisting of stainless-steel bricks, and concealing a surprising mirror-like heart that contrasts with the satin-like softness of the exterior surface, “Agora” (2019) is the synthesis of the ideas borne by the exhibition and express the artist’s desire to move increasingly towards architecture, the creation of spaces.
Info: Perrotin Gallery, 76 rue de Turenne, Paris, Duration: 16/3-8/6/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.perrotin.com
