Jean-Michel Othoniel
A student at the École nationale supérieure d’arts de Paris-Cergy, Jean-Michel Othoniel belongs to a generation of artists for whom the history of conceptual art had come to an end. Keen to pursue his quest for beauty in its own right, he has created a personal pantheon comprising certain artists from the Arte Povera and Minimal Art movements, but above all French artists such as Annette Messager, Louise Bourgeois and Sophie Calle. He held his first solo exhibition in 1989, ‘À travers le grand vide critique’, at the Galerie Antoine Candau in Paris. In the years that followed, he created provocative sulphur sculptures, which attracted considerable attention at Documenta in Kassel in 1992 and earned him early international recognition.
Buoyed by this success, he continued his experiments into the properties of glass, particularly at the International Glass Centre in Marseille, where he sought to artificially reproduce the appearance of a rock that is precious above all others: obsidian. This quest and his related discoveries in the world of glass led him to work in the Saint-Gobain laboratories, then at CIRVA, and finally with the master glassmaker Oscar Zanetti in Murano. Blown glass, which lends itself to all manner of transformations and is so rich in symbolic connotations, would henceforth become his material of choice. As a resident at the Villa Medici in Rome in 1996, he suspended glass necklaces in the Villa’s gardens in a gesture that would soon become his trademark.
His polychrome glass objects effectively become the components of ambitious installations that aim to recreate dreamlike, Eden-like spaces. “I like,” he says, “to give the visitor the impression that they are alone before the work, in a secluded Garden of Eden, an exotic seraglio cut off from the world. ‘My glass sculptures are meant to be discovered by walking amongst them.’ His works—forbidden fruits generously offered—come to life and blend into the landscape, like subtle organic growths playing with light and shadow. Beauty has its flip side, and at a time when AIDS was wreaking havoc, Jean-Michel Othoniel was, of course, well aware of this. In 1997, he created a limited edition piece, *Le collier cicatrice* (The Scar Necklace), a small red glass necklace offered to those who wish to wear it with pride.
La vie et la beauté n’abdiquent pourtant pas leurs droits et l’artiste étend son champ d’opérations à l’espace urbain avec la commande de la RATP en 2000, pour l’une des entrées du métro Palais Royal-Musée du Louvre. Les couronnes de verre et d’aluminium sur la Place Colette, et le banc adjacent, créent une atmosphère féérique toute particulière. Quatre ans plus tard, le Théâtre de la Ville de Rochefort et le Théâtre du Châtelet à Paris lui donnent l’occasion de travailler pour la scène pour Le Petit Théâtre de Peau d’Âne. Othoniel cherche toujours à concilier les exigences de la commande publique monumentale et celles de la beauté plastique, comme en témoigne encore Peggy’s Necklace, monumental collier de verre bleu disposé sur la façade de la Collection Peggy Guggenheim à Venise.
