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“The Boat of Tears” (2004). © Jean-Michel Othoniel. Courtesy of Galerie Perrotin, Paris |
Anyone who has seen Jean-Michel Othoniel’s delightful Paris Métro entrance on the Place Colette, all playful round shapes made of colored glass balls and …
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“The Boat of Tears” (2004). © Jean-Michel Othoniel. Courtesy of Galerie Perrotin, Paris |
Anyone who has seen Jean-Michel Othoniel’s delightful Paris Métro entrance on the Place Colette, all playful round shapes made of colored glass balls and rings of metal, would think that this is a lighthearted artist who enjoys making pretty things.
But no. As amply demonstrated by the new retrospective of his work, “My Way,” at the Centre Pompidou, this maker of bright, colorful baubles has a dark side. Right from the beginning of his career in the 1980s, however, his work already showed the penchant for the poetic and ethereal that can still be found in his more cheerful recent creations.
The early works were full of questioning and concerned with the fleeting, fragile nature of life, as in “The Photographic Failures,” in which all that is left of a photo is a ghostly image on a stained photographic plate. Other small installations incorporate delicate materials like a woman’s stocking or a moth.
Othoniel then started working with sulfur, attracted by its strange, acidic yellow color and the associations of its name (in French, “soufre,” not far from “souffre,” or “suffer”), first using it in small quantities for pieces like a map of France attached to piece of toile de Jouy (type of French patterned cloth). As he became handier with molding this versatile element, he made bigger sculptures like the one with a block of sulfur set atop a rusty mooring post. He later introduced wax and phosphorus into his works, which became increasingly eroticized and concerned with all the orifices of the body as well as sexual identity. A video called “Glory Holes” plays amusingly with various possibilities of holes (nothing too shocking in spite of the name) using only a sheet and a few actors.
Othoniel then moved on to using obsidian and finally settled on working with glass in the late ’90s, when he started working with the glassmakers of Murano. After a period during which he produced “scarred” glass, he began to make the fairytale glass installations he is best known for. Keep in mind, however, that even the magical Métro station entrance has a dark, moody name: “The Kiosk of the Night Walkers.”
Don’t miss Othoniel’s gorgeous tower made of coppery-golden glass bricks on the mezzanine, visible from the first escalator you take on the way to the show.
The other new show at the Pompidou Center, “François Morellet: Reinstallations,” comes as another surprise and is also a must-see. The posters for the exhibition might lead you to
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François Morellet’s “Reflections in Water Distorted by the Spectator” (1964). © François Morellet © Adagp, Paris 2011 |
think that Morellet (born 1926) is yet another Dan Flavin copycat playing with fluorescent light tubes. Not at all. Morellet is his own man, obsessed with the simplicity of lines and the patterns they can form.
Although he is also a painter, this show includes only his installations, some of them mind-bending kinetic works using light and patterns that will have your head spinning. Many of them are interactive – feel free to press the buttons to create your own versions of his witty light shows.
One of the most intriguing and beautiful pieces is “Reflections in Water Distorted by the Spectator” (1964). When you move a lever, the water in a box on the floor is disturbed, changing the reflections of the arrangement of neon lights hanging above it.
These installations will be dismantled when this highly enjoyable show ends, so do try to see it before July 4.
Centre Pompidou: 19, rue Beaubourg, 75004 Paris. Tel.: 01 44 78 12 33. Open 11am-9pm. Closed Tuesday. Métro: Rambuteau. Admission: €12. “My Way: Jean-Michel Othoniel”: through May 23. “François Morellet: Reinstallations”: through July 4. 2011. www.centrepompidou.fr
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