Jean-Michel Othoniel - Lot 105

Jean-Michel Othoniel Why Glass ? 48 pages, paperback, dust jacket Numbered 166 from an edition of 285 + current edition "L'art en écrit", 2010. Editions Janninck Format: 125 x 210 mm An obsidian mirror is included, an original work signed and unique for each copy. Note: The spellbinding aesthetic of Jean-Michel Othoniel (b. 1964, Saint-Etienne; lives and works in Paris) is based on the notion of emotional geometry. Through the repetition of modular elements such as bricks and pearls - his signature and most recurrent motif - he creates magnificent sculptures whose relationship to the human scale ranges from the intimate to the monumental. His predilection for materials with reversible and often reflective properties - in particular, the blown glass that has become emblematic of his practice since the early 1990s - echoes the profoundly equivocal nature of his art. At once monumental and delicate, baroque and minimal, poetic and political, his contemplative forms have the power, like oxymorons, to reconcile opposites. The fact that he devotes himself to in-situ commissions for public spaces gives some of his work an almost architectural dimension. However, Jean-Michel Othoniel's holistic sensibility also brings him closer to feng shui, or the art of attuning people to their environment, in his case by enabling the public to inhabit their world through reflection and movement. In this manifesto, Jean-Michel Othoniel returns to the materials at the heart of his work. The first edition is accompanied by an obsidian mirror, an original work signed and unique to each copy.