Born in the 1960s, in Saint-Étienne, a working-class mining town in central France, Jean-Michel Othoniel grew up amidst the realities of his industrial surroundings. He also had access to the vibrant contemporary collection of the Saint-Étienne Museum of Modern Art, in terms of size, second only to the Pompidou in France. At the age of ten, he encountered the work of American Minimalist Robert Morris, an experience that left a lasting impression. In this new exhibition, the works follow in the footsteps of those shown at the Collection Lambert in Avignon. They reflect the artist’s genuine interest in minimalism and abstraction, showing that beauty and sensuality are in no way at odds with radicality.
From early on, he saw art as a parallel universe, embracing the importance of play, an ethos that would later define his artistic practice. He had moved to Paris to study art, arriving in the 1980s, a transformative period in Western art. Movements such as Minimalism, Conceptual Art, Fluxus, the Situationist International, Arte Povera, and Land Art, with their associated Happenings and Performance Art had reshaped artistic mediums, with transmedia installations becoming mainstream contemporary art. Even as the freedom of artistic expression expanded, the AIDS crisis brought unimaginable suffering and loss to the gay community, profoundly shaping Othoniel’s worldview. His first works were driven by feelings of despair. In 1917, Paul Klee, writing amidst the horrors of World War I, observed: “The more horrible this world (as today, for instance), the more abstract our art, whereas a happy world brings forth an art of the here and now.”
Klee’s words illuminate the subject of the grid in modernist painting—a motif that embodies confinement. Grids, monotonous and relentless, mimic the harsh walls of prison cells. They are at once utterly new and endlessly repetitive, offering no resistance, no escape, no alternative. Yet, paradoxically, it is in this sense of absolute powerlessness that the grid becomes a passage. The grid makes one’s own body into the pathway itself. This duality—confinement and passage—is the key to entering Othoniel’s work, which is deeply shaped by personal experience and transformed by the cultural contexts he engages with. How is the grid a passage? In the same sense a wall is a passage.
Throughout his career, Othoniel has created many walls and pathways that dissolve boundaries. Before his shimmering, dreamlike Precious Stonewall, made of glass bricks, there was Wish Wall, a wall in a gallery covered in phosphor where visitors could strike and light matches. The notion of passage takes literal or physical form in his works, whether in a small 1986 photographic piece (Autoportrait en robe de pr.tre-traitement), which captures a doll-like figure traversing a frozen dam spillway, or in his larger public installations—such asThe Kiosk of the Nightwalkers, his redesign of a Paris Metro entrance, or Boat of Tears, a vessel built and used by Cuban refugees. His monumental glass beads, developed over the years, are also passages—mental pathways, as his 2011 Centre Pompidou exhibition title My Way explicitly pointed out. (This mid-career retrospective traveled across Asia and America, introducing new audiences to his iconic Murano glass beads and glass bricks.)
When the glass brick first appeared, it was shrouded by a net of glass-bead necklaces in Precious Stonewall (2010), suggesting an overlap in their significance. Walls and beads may seem like opposites at first—real vs. imaginary, solid vs. empty, concrete vs. abstract, substantial vs. ephemeral—but in a deeper sense, they become interchangeable, somewhere between building blocks and pixels.
The idea of glass bricks emerged during Othoniel’s travels in India. Although he initially traveled to work with glassmakers there, the cultural context was never incidental; it became integral to the work. In India, he observed piles of bricks stacked by the roadside and saw in them projections of people’s hopes and dreams. From this, he distilled a universal form he later called emotional geometry, in order to place the people who are the source of his inspiration on center stage.
There is a superficial resemblance between a brick wall and the canonical modern painting. The motif of the brick wall, which appears in Philip Guston’s cartoon period, might have been intended as a form of mockery. Two decades later, in a painting titled Sharp & Dottie by New York street artist Martin Wong, the brick wall takes on a different meaning. The painting depicts an embracing couple in the foreground, at the bottom of the composition, while behind them, a painstakingly painted, ragged brick wall lit by moon light occupies 90 percent of the canvas. This brick wall clearly represents the hopes and dreams of the protagonists. Though the genre is strictly realistic, Wong’s painting ultimately finds a true connection with Paul Klee’s grids.
The picture was painted in 1984, in New York City, contemporary to Keith Haring, Spike Lee, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jeff Koons, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Jim Jarmusch, as well as the rise of the hip-hop culture and the LGBTQ rights movement. Othoniel experienced all this as a young artist visiting from Europe.
His love for travel, inspired by the diversity of New York, shaped his decentralized creative approach. He was also deeply influenced by the seminal exhibition Les Magiciens de la Terre 1, which opened his eyes to the poetic power of art from diverse cultures. Poetry also became a visual force in his work, melting away the solidity of reality. Walls are built to divide and contain, as seen in Berlin, yet they can also become sites and symbols of gathering, prayer, and protest, like the Wailing Wall, the Xidan Democracy Wall, or the Stonewall movement.
1- Curated by Jean-Hubert Martin, and shown over two sites in Paris, the Centre Pompidou and the Grand Halle de la Villette in 1989, this international exhibition brought together one hundred contemporary artists, half from the West, and the other half from non-Western countries.
If we only look at the cultural significance of walls across cultures, it is no surprise that the grid is a recurring subject in modern art, attracting artists who devote entire careers to its seemingly rigid and repetitive form. A wall represents both an end and a beginning—a threshold where physical effort ceases and hallucination begins, transforming itself into a screen for collective projections.
Othoniel’s glass brick structures unfocus the eye and consequently the mind through prolonged gazing. This state of visual suspension awakens in the viewer an awareness of the generative power of human sensory perception itself. As the eyes unravel and freely associate, we see the concrete object dematerialize into pure light and color. Thus, the physical presence of the glass bricks becomes their own dissolution; the once-rigid surface crumbles and reveals a tunnel forged by the sensory organ of the beholder.
Excerpt from the catalog of the exhibition The Enchantment at the Long Museum, Shanghai. 2025.
ZHOU YI
Curator and co-founder of C5CNM, CLC Gallery Venture in Beijing
Born in 1964 in Saint-Étienne, France
Lives and works in Paris, France
Jean-Michel Othoniel’s enchanting aesthetics revolves around the notion of emotional geometry. Through the repetition of modular elements such as bricks or his signature beads, he creates exquisite jewelry-like sculptures whose relationship to the human scale ranges from intimacy to monumentality. His predilection for materials with reversible and often reflective properties—particularly blown glass, which has been the hallmark of his practice since the early 1990s—relates to the deeply equivocal nature of his art. Monumental yet delicate, baroque yet minimal, poetic yet political, his contemplative forms, like oxymorons, have the power to reconcile opposites. While his dedication to site-specific commissions for public spaces has led some of his work to take an architectural and social turn, Othoniel’s holistic sensibility compares to fêng shui, or the art of harmonizing people with their environment, allowing viewers to inhabit his world through reflection and motion.
More about the artist
