Exhibitions

The New Orleans Mardi Gras is made up of three different parades: the official one, the Society of Saint Anne parade, and the Zulu parade. With no predefined route, this third parade, the mise en abyme of the carnival, is organized by the city's African American community and pokes fun at the official parade.

The revelers caricature themselves by painting themselves black. Directly inspired by this tradition, in 2003 Jean-Michel Othoniel created a gigantic necklace, Black is Beautiful, in Murano glass.

This exhibition was based on the idea of a processional that interrupts a dream. An invitation to wander though a space where the body is absent, but from which emerge memories of forms that might have been; a walk among signposts to be discovered on one’s own.

The concept of wandering, unrelated to space or time, was born of Jean-Michel Othoniel’s relationship with writing. Fairy tales are important for Othoniel, and he frequently invokes them in his work. Here, the holders of palanquins and banners have all fallen asleep, under a spell, as in Sleeping Beauty,. Time has stopped and is crystalized in glass.

The idea of the dream and its relationship to automatic writing is very close to Othoniel's work,  as dreams are open to interpretation but also building blocks for individual stories. Associations and connections are made by the spectator, who is invited to reappropriate the artworks. 

This exhibition offers something timeless: an empty bed where one might have slept or loved, large-scale necklaces evoking the absent body, impossibly heavy and fragile glass banners, a landscape infused with love, golden rainshowers.

Also presented in the exhibition was Lagrimas, a series of glass bottles containing a world of teardrop pendants - glass elements suspended in water-filled vases - made of coloured glass. Fabricated in Mexico, this artwork likens the glass pendants to moods, tears of pleasure, of pain, or perhaps both. These two thousand floating objects are like words in an imaginary musical score.