OTHONIEL VERS PDF ANG - Fondation Cartier pour l'art ...

Press release
Press Opening on Thursday, October 30, 2003 at 3:00 pm
The Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain
presents Crystal Palace, a unique exhibition by Othoniel,
from October 31, 2003 to January 11, 2004.
After taking part in the artist’s workshops in Jouy-en-Josas (1989) and
after participating in the Azur (1993) and Amours (1997) exhibitions,
Othoniel is back with an original project entirely conceived as a pendant
to Jean Nouvel’s glass building. In much the same spirit as his
Kiosque des Noctambules (2000) which re-interpreted, after Hector
Guimard, the entrance to the Palais-Royal subway station, he invites the
public to take another walk, this time through the ground floor spaces
and into the gardens of the Fondation Cartier.
His interest in metamorphoses, sublimations, and
transmutations led Jean-Michel Othoniel (born
in 1964; lives in Paris) to privilege materials with
reversible properties. His sculptures in sulfur, lead, wax or
phosphorus attracted attention, and he rapidly emerged
on the international scene, exhibiting in Paris, Tokyo, New
York, Berlin… His sources of inspiration are minimalism
and Arte povera, the artistic expressions of Broodthaers or
Duchamp, and, in the literary field, Borges, Gracq, and
Roussel. A special fascination—at once melancholic and
scientific—for the major developments of the 19th century
(photography, traveling, museums…), impelled him in
the late ‘80s to embrace other forms of creativity, including
sculpture, drawing, photography, writing, dance and
video.
In 1992 he was invited to show some of his sulfur
sculptures in the Documenta in Kassel, Germany. In 1994
he participated in the Féminin/Masculin exhibition at the
Pompidou Center where he presented one of his major
works, My Beautiful Closet.
It was in 1993 that Othoniel irremediably introduced
glass into his work. He began experimenting with its properties
together with master glassmaker, Oscar Zanetti, in
Murano. The artist molds the desired shapes in clay, and
the master glassmaker then takes them and reproduces
them along with their formal imperfections and irregularities.
“Glass has a memory. If you injure a ball of melted
glass by making an incision or any kind of cut into it, the
glass will heal up. But once it cools, the wound will reappear.
So Zanetti used these wounds to create some of the
shapes I was looking for.”
Blown-glass beads were thus made in Venice, as well as
at the CIRVA—the International Glass Art Research Center
founded in Marseille in 1986—and then fashioned into
necklaces and enigmatic harnesses, a combination of jewelry,
decoration and erotica.
Transformation, transmutation of matter, rites of passage
from one state to another, all of these reflect another rite
which is fundamental to the artist’s work, that of traveling,
with the memories brought back from gardens
explored or secluded dwellings. In these spaces of ultimate
freedom, open to reversibility and chance encounters,
Othoniel sets up his glass creations for the fleeting
pleasure of a temporary traveling companion—who is
both a stranger and an accomplice. Thus, in 1996 his
necklaces were suspended among the bamboo in the Villa
Medicis gardens in Rome, then from the trees in the
Venetian gardens of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection,
and in 1999 in the Alhambra and the Generalife in
Grenada. His pieces live, mingle with the old stones or
the foliage, like so many organic excrescences that absorb
Harnais, 1997
Garden of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice
Private collection, Paris
Above left:
Les amants suspendus, 1999
Collection of the artist