Interviews, Issue 4

Jean-Michel Othoniel

Poetic Fantasy

Words SUBIN ANDERSON

Photography LAURA STEVENS

One can find escape in enchantment and realize the extraordinary beauty in our ordinary life through Jean-Michel Othoniel‘s work. We unwind on Othoniel’s intimate stories in this conversation and reflect on his present. Each step of Othoniel’s journey can be connected to his works. Through his signature glass beads, one can ponder the ever-evolving fragility and robustness of life—and channel hope and comfort.

SUBIN ANDERSON: You had quite a busy year in 2021.

JEAN-MICHEL OTHONIEL: Yes! First, I built a new studio in Montreuil, which I started during the lockdown. The renovation of this 50,000-square-foot space allowed me to remain focused on my work even though we were all experiencing great uncertainty. Every morning, I would draw alone and work with my team in the afternoon.

Also, the Petit Palais Museum in Paris offered me an extensive exhibition, ‘The Theorem of Narcissus’ (2021). Last year was full of doubts and joy because the exhibition was a great success with more than 200,000 visitors, but I know that our access to art is still precarious, and we are all dependent on the global health situation.

SA: Art seemed to find you at a very young age. You went to a school in Saint-Etienne where students visited the museum every Wednesday afternoon.

JMO: I believe in the importance of art for children’s education. My personal experience is proof that one can discover new horizons through art, especially if it is avant-garde and ahead of its time, which was the case at the end of the 1970s in the Museum of Saint Etienne, my native city.

SA: You described the opening night of an exhibition by Robert Morris as having the most significant impact on your childhood and motivating you to be free. I am curious to know what ‘freedom’ meant to you during that moment.

JMO: Freedom meant, above all, joy and impertinence in the face of a period that was still very conservative in the French provinces. The ’70s were a time of change, notably with the social movements for equal rights for many minorities. But the freedom I perceived was also of play, where art was linked to life. In this sense, the work of Robert Morris invited us to have fun with his sculptures and be interactive. I also attended my first performances, and these actions, which I perceived as poetic, filled me with wonder as a child.

SA: Did this eventually lead you to create art?

JMO: At that time, I was only a child from a modest background dazzled by the world of art, and I drew by regularly going to art classes in the evenings—drawing was already my passion.

SA: Let’s fast forward to the years at École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts de Paris-Cergy, where you studied under Sophie Calle and Christian Boltanski. Has their teaching influenced you to use photographic material in your early practice?

JMO: I was lucky to meet this generation of artists when they were still very young and creating, each in their own way. A new approach to art highlighted “personal mythologies”–they were speaking about the world by speaking about themselves.

Photography was a medium that corresponded to this perspective on oneself and the time in the 80s because of its speed of execution. It was becoming more democratic, and [there was a new] possibility of multiplying images infinitely. But for my part, I worked on the photographic material rather than the representation. My “images,” which were unique, were inspired by the chemistry of old photographs of the 19th century.

SA: Was this the first [art]work you ever made?

JMO: These Photographic Failures’ (‘Les Insuccès Photographiques) were my first works. I was lucky enough to exhibit them in 1988 at the Musée d’art Moderne de Paris while I was still in art school; this exhibition allowed me to join a gallery and live off my work right away.

SA: Can you talk about social and academic life in the ’80s, especially the art scenes and memories you miss the most?

JMO: We were in a period where the large colored image, especially in painting, was omnipresent. There was not much room for a poetic work like mine compared to Free Figuration in France, the Transavantgarde in Italy, and the new German Expressionism. But perhaps, for this reason, I had the freedom to express my difference.

Also, I remember a feeling of celebration, joy, and liberation linked to the economic madness of the time. At the same time, a veil of sadness and fear with the appearance of AIDS in our lives. It affected us intimately with the disappearance of friends, professors, and artists—everything collapsed. But I am still nostalgic for our carefree attitude and the levity we lived despite it all.

SA: As exciting as it sounds, they were also the years of darkness.

JMO: Yes, these years marked by AIDS have conditioned our relationship to the other, to the body, to love. For this reason, my whole generation of artists deals with the body. Jan Hoet understood this very well with his great exhibition in Kassel for the ‘documenta IX’ of 1992. In this major exhibition, I expressed my intimate vision of this body in suffering that we had to live and love.

I was in residence for several months in 1991 at the new art museum in Kowloon. I presented my small sculptures in yellow sulfur in lacquered wooden cases, which represented fragments of bodies accompanied by small objects that I had found in Guangzhou, China. Hong Kong was still linked to England, and Western contemporary art was almost nonexistent. Moreover, the works I presented at that time had been made and shown in Hong Kong. It was a real adventure and the beginning of my passion for Asia.