Jean-Michel Othoniel - Texts

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