Imagine a person in a room sitting on a couch. He gets up to leave the room and goes to the kitchen. But what exactly happens between the moment he left the room and the moment he finds himself in the kitchen ? Where was he ? What was he doing ? The work of Olivier Nottellet turns around such intervals : he fictionalizes them and surveys their parameters. His exhibitions often add extra rooms onto the already existent spaces, thereby altering the architecture. In Zone de ralentissement (BBB, 2015), a peephole bordered in black felt offers a punctured view into an illuminated cupboard. One finds a hanging accessory, a pair of black trousers, allocated there in reserve. What is produced is an alveolus auxiliary to the larger space "the exteriority of an interior" or the "extime". In 2006 at the Galerie Noisy-le-Sec, a bourgeois home with rooms made to function as exhibition spaces, the artist adds one "more" room to the large hall. It is a room in which the entrance is at once penetrable and blocked by objects : a mounted mirror reverts the spectator back towards himself as much as it does towards the space behind him. These additional rooms materialize as sites of hypotheses within the exhibition, that in turn becomes a matrix from which trajectories radiate off of : a machine to construct disorder, the outline of a journey with multiple twists.

Except that no, it is not quite like this. Even before these scenarios — these confrontations with the constructed exhibition space — there is another beginning operative in the artist's productive arrangements, one that is logically anterior but effectively coinciding. This beginning takes place on the space of the page, in the drawing studio. Portable and elementary, drawing holds multiple temporal economies : repetition, speed, resolution, patience. Drawing constitutes a ferment of expenditure, an excess of leisure time in the life of the artist. It is the means par excellence for saving on economic constraints — constraints of place, of project or of public fundings. The artist’s notebooks accumulate a work of waste, a primary material : things to lose or things to keep.

The pathway of thought undertaken here first of all concerns itself with the emergence, step by step, of different moments in Nottellet’s œuvre. Drawing, décor, construction, cinematographic montage, narration, color, body : the many variables that lock in the wanderings of the spectator, inviting him to cross the gaps between things — between bodies, images and words — in order to experiment with the realm of the intermediary. Yet these variables are also jumbled up in the singular combinations that each work confers upon them.

Drawing Everywhere, Drawings Somewhere Else

It starts with black. Sometimes the artist speaks of his drawings as an "ink motor", as the most concentrated point of work : masses and obscure flux, scatological emanations or — why not — a flow of black bile that threatens to cover over everything. Black as melancholic material that the drawing shatters, spreads, drips, turns to ridicule. The drawing constructs itself in order to escape an imminent stagnation, unfolding itself either by way of expansion or piece by piece. At each point it receives the fragmented white, making room once again for the real of the paper page to return.

An estrangement, the plasticity of volume swallows the drawing to in turn encompass and generate the trace, abstraction, what is delimited as proper to the two-dimensional. Throughout, the black does not cease transforming itself into blobs, grills, structures, clothing, bodies — all of which are isolated from one another, never resembling either themselves or other things. Rather it is through the transitions, environment and instability of these transformations that they are understood, that is, according to their tendency to subtract away from their unity and blur the mirrored logic of representation. Just like the excrements of darkness that squat the drawings, one sees a human body amalgamated to an architecture : the two cannot exist together, the one can only exist through contact with the other. Plasticity is always in excess to the corporeality it produces. Bodies fall outside of themselves, detaching, and become objects.

These objects — captured by the black yet at the same time extremely mobile, nomadic fragments — divert the logic of their own resemblance to the point of the absurd. They are in a certain sense impossible objects, always in contradiction with themselves, that no longer fall under any concept (not even that of the object). To mimic Lawrence Weiner : a part object that is not any part of any object. All of the varying degrees of outpouring and of retraction are put to work. One is confronted by a multiplicity of oppositions, of scale, of coherencies and of distortion...

But there is one contrariety that is particularly pervasive, a divergence of two aspects of drawing that are nonetheless tied : the planarity of the page procures a space for the graphic to traverse, whereas the drawing’s plasticity tends to overflow the page. Evidently, what is at stake here is something else entirely than the problem of perspectival illusion. Rather, one is "faced" with objects that dream of escaping the page and populating the "Euclidian" space with their black agitations, to pervert that space in turn.

First the drawing on the page, then the leap of the leap of the drawing from the page to three-dimensional space. This hiatus is characteristic of Nottellet’s work when taken in its unity. As an overture, the leap from the page marks its own surging forth, which in turn is never homogenous with its own developments. Rather, the leap crosses all of these moments in their disparity. The flows do not stop changing their material, thereby mutating themselves as a consequence. It is in this sense then that Nottellet, still today, can be said to have made a body of work out of draw-ing — even though the production of this body levels more and more a mixing of forms, multiple, enacting itself before anything in temporary, in situ installations.

On Décor

Once it escapes the page, the drawing falls into the constructed spaces where exhibitions take place : those of galleries, art centers, urban sites, institutions that take on the task of "embellishing" the public realm. While there are a number of pieces that are not site-specific, the artist nev- er just drops off an object outside any relation to place. What he does is intervene with what is already constructed, altering it. Does the artist become an architect then ? Yes and no. With only a modest set of means, he redrafts these places in a provisional and improvised manner. He is not charged with rendering these places habitable, as is expected of the architect — a norm that persists even if the architectonic environment encircling and informing our lives is constantly deranging the "livable". In any case, the artist’s own confrontation with the built environment comes in second, after that of the architect.

These reconfigurations produce not an architecture but an artificial construction that touches upon a real construction. There, between the artificial and real, they insert décors. These elaborations are economical in their means, temporary and incredibly precarious. But they expose what is already cheap, temporary and precarious in today’s architectural norms — especially those of exhibition spaces.

Take the BBB in Toulouse, an art center-cum-warehouse in a wayward suburb. To varying degrees, these warehouses are either the sites of superstores (Décathlon, Bricorama, etc), of airports or of art centers. Every time their layout slightly changes and that is all there is to it. Nottellet inverses this given. In the place of an architecture with the pretense of specific, user friendly durability, the artist constructs a spatial, experimental semblance to detract from any assigned functions. Infusing the place instead with multiple aberrations, the very poverty of such architectures is exposed.

Nottellet can be taken to be a cynic in the sense of the ancients, of course : he counterfeits the official currency of architecture. His décors make dynamic that straight-faced presumptuousness. At a 2006 exhibition at Crac de Sète, entitled "Faites peur !", temporary exhibition walls form a long corridor with a recto verso décor where there had only been a single space. In the backstage wings rest office chairs with their rolling feet cast into the walls. On the other side of the walls, these feet appear — and without any promise. The artist generates a hybrid assemblage of objects and places that derealizes and fictionalizes them both.

Contra minimalism, this redistribution does not invite a meditation on those real physical conditions of the white cube and its interactions with either one or all of the works. Rather, it amalgamates in an unlikely manner the furniture, spacing and construction — summoning all at once in our memory, over and over, of "scenes of mouse holes" in animated drawings. There is also a meandering attentive to corridor space, serving essentially to pass through it. And finally, there is the impression of a film suggestive of a cordoned off space in a larger space, constructed in order to be filmed by a camera : perspective as the informant of a spectator’s gaze. Each interval — which is one of memory, of displacement, of a technical view — counts. One rediscovers something of the drawing on the page mixed with body and architecture, this time materialized by the multiple connections of the exhibition space.

The constructions are full of very basic and standard elements : lamps, office chairs, practical clothing, shovels, rolls of paper. There is form, but maladaptive form. There is sense, but missing sense. There is a chair, but an animal chair. The act of assemblage suddenly charges them with an unexpected suspense. Distributions of concrete and absent vacillate, are engorged and regurgitated in new drafts. Artifice binds itself to the real of the thing, becoming sign. Affect interferes since through its bias positions permute : a "real" thing can become a sign, a "real" sign can become a thing. So the assemblages of objects do not so much resemble maquettes as they do the names that they are given. Le ring de rouleaux, La cage à lampes, L’instrument démesuré. Names that are more lightweight than the thing, as dematerialized, yet still containing it as an image. The combinations and scaffoldings are liberated from cause and effect. Wherever one is forewarned, wherever one waits at attention — "no smoke without fire" —Nottellet offers instead, "no smoke without toast".

If according to Charles Peirce a sign is what represents some thing for someone, then with Nottellet the sign insists "!" Shiftless and unresponsive to every offer to be included within meaning [du sens], they certainly alert the spectators to its waverings : constantly transforming themselves into demarcations, stretching or puncturing a flow, a phrase. This falls and that splits in two. There is a little pause or a mass of color and this sets off again. One crosses the décors like the gaps in a story about to be told. They are seen as places ready to make sense of the estuaries and the peripeteia — without any one thing dominating — perhaps through the dream of becoming something else, through the meeting and coming together of the cinematographic, through narration or construction.

Génial Olivier

If one asks him about the way he arranges his scenarios, the artist Olivier Nottellet evokes a reference that has been crucial for him since a young age : Génial Olivier, who frequents the cover of the quarterly journal Spirou. It’s a one-page story detailing a young boy’s genius ideas that will never work. One such idea is a paste that he puts in a big tube, like an enormous tube of toothpaste. When one pushes the paste out of the tube, it spontaneously forms a wall. With his "invention" in hand he meets up with a greedy developer on an empty lot. Génial Olivier stumbles upon three wooden planks on the ground, lines them up and then takes out his giant tube. He spreads the dough to form a square in relation to the three planks, letting it settle. The paste swells and a white cube, or house, appears under the astonished eyes of the developer who is already whipping out his checkbook. Unfortunately it starts raining and it’s obvious that the idea’s missing something : the paste that made this splendid instantaneous house melts away with the rain, running white under the catastrophic eyes of our inventor. All that remains of the beautiful house without a roof is its three planks for a door. Génial Olivier walks away disappointed.

This episode gives meaning to the sporadic, sequential yet "delinquent" narrative running through Nottellet’s installations. Assembly and disassembly, invention and ruin, are so closely aligned that the scenes of the narrative hold the advantage over any unifying narrative thread. Take again, for example, the 2015 exhibition "Zone de ralentissement" at BBB. A partitioned space, still open to the main room, is anchored by two black rectangles on the walls. One of them, scoring a corner angle, is framed by a mural drawing of cables that in turn extend into the real through the three steel cables traversing it. The drawing is made to coincide with the real of what is drawn — something the artist does frequently — as the cables in the drawing collapse into those of the built environment. In between the cables four office chairs have been deposited. All face the same direction, in the same race, except the last one. It’s occupied with something else entirely : the doubling of its backrest, an intimate sharing of a single seat and base, transformed into a "flirt-object". A small window, on a piece of attached green felt, reflects the backrest that cuddles close to the other. One would call this window a "soft" portal to the adjacent room since the cables themselves also pass through, beckoning us towards a sequel.

Between musical score, sporting competition ground and antechamber of a "to be continued", the flickering installation marks a crossroad with its charging and discharging of diverse intrigues. Once hooked onto the gaze, the installation distributes it between the pleasure of playful banter and the curiosity of what is happening in the neighboring space. Going to the other side of the wall, the spectator enters into a darkened box separated from the main space. The extended cords change function completely : they take on the duty of limitation, like low iron railings around a precious work, to keep the spectator at a distance. In this case, however, the positioning is absurd since what the cables separate us from is an immaterial video projection. The only details that move are the projected parade of drawings.

The installation of chairs, color and cables disorient the space, joining it to something outside of itself that inflects every parameter. Elsewhere, in contrast, certain montages graft a succession of states into a single moment. Such is the case with a two-minute video from 1999, L’assiette, that was included in the exhibition "La Balance des Blancs" (2010) at the Musée des arts décoratifs in Paris. A person seen in profile plays with his knife on the rim of an empty plate while waiting to be served. Suddenly he turns his head to one side, that one sees from the back not the front, and plunges it into the plate. This is the meal of a bachelor. In lieu of the meal and yearning for a rest, he transforms the plate into an awkward pillow. Exhausted, he immediately skips out on the expected meal that in any case will not come. There is an absurd variation of the metonymy "to eat one’s plate" : here, it is "to sleep one’s plate."

Often, the arrangement of elements do not appear to have any more content than the pursuit of movement itself, to see the deferral of every resolution. These scenarios pass not so much through language as they do through the very temporalizations of the gaze : the instant of sight, the time taken for comprehension and for conclusion. An instant’s synchronicity can seize an ensemble in its complexity, but perspectives proliferate diachronically. A gaze that immerses itself in an installation traverses signals between the spatial connections of form and their polysemy. Conclusion : is there one ? There is the effect of ruptures, scansions produced by meandering. Taken aback and uprooted from his usual habits, the spectator experiences time non-linearly, as spatialized. This is the point from which the drawings, colors and objects depart : they bring together just one part of the story in the spectrum of place.

Elsewhere again, the connection of the heterogeneous lodges itself directly into a single room. One encounters there a shovel, symmetrically scaled, with the cerebellum of a human spine bound to its handle (all ordered by the artist on the Internet, with free delivery to his house.) It is a mirrored object, displayed on a large wooden tray. Is it a nod to Surrealism ? Yes, except the work avoids that "epidemic of sleep-dreaming", abolishing boundaries between dreams and reality, the surrealists lived for. Far from simply reproducing this onirism, a selective repetition extracts a methodical, operative principle : collect the scattered pieces of the real, arrange them back in the order of an assemblage. The “shovel-skeleton” work is emblematic of this principle. It exposes the Discourse of methodor the finesse — proper to the work, which does not abolish boundaries but traverses them by reinventing the breaching points. By dispersing the signification of things, the assemblage constantly, and perversely, bypasses similitude and analogy. Communicated in lieu of these two tyrants of representation are action and propulsion.

The Roaming of Color

There’s no need to know the layout of a house in order to run into its walls. Throughout Nottellet’s décors, color produces conflicts. His forceful interventions dramatically conjure the instability of spaces, with mass monochromes that are able to shift in time and displace the weight of the built environment, to alternate between empty and full. There is yellow, black, green felt, of course white, and very rarely a pale blue. Most often colors are saturated so as to best permeate the important surfaces and superimpose new schematics onto the space.

The abundant use of dense, monochromatic colors creates a violent effect to the point of corporeal stupefaction. At a corner of neon yellow, the eye passes right through the wall. The color causes a beat to skip on the spot. It momentarily paralyzes trajectories and conjoins previously disparate elements of décor. "La Géographie du Dessin" at the Musée d’art contemporain in Sérignan, 2011 : black pours itself out in an irregular curb on the floor, chasing up onto the walls of the space. Two temporary gallery walls pose on this vast flow with their colors — yellow for one and black and white for the other — popping out. They block off a place, serving as its entrance markers. Only the fragile green felt-covered sticks seem capable of containing this flood of black, or wasteland, that takes a bite out of the exhibition space.

In almost every installation the presence of color plays a decisive, configuring role : it provokes the eye, gives rhythm to surfaces, moves light around with its dazzling neon consistency. The colors explode the given space to hint at a cinematographic-like frontality. Moreover, their monumentality directly addresses the bodies of spectators. So is it painting or more of a putting to work of color outside of painting ? Faced with such a choice, there’s not a moment of hesitation: one must choose both.

The space of color active in the work at once belongs to painting and departs from it. It creates a perspective, even speculative, milieu. In this work, color constructs the very space of the interior by distributing itself along intensities and contrasts, so much so that it collapses the opposition between the eye that looks and what it perceives : "Colors see themselves, they hold in themselves pure seeing and are simultaneously the object and organ of vision". The milieu of color is never directly perceptible to us. It always appears in a distorted manner, secondhand, through the mediation of a surface of inscription and variations of light that render modal its extension. Yet even though they distinguish themselves from it, all of the chromatic distributions — in terms of the gaze, of extended surface and of inscription — hold in themselves a memory of the milieu, of the immanence, which they are only partial, derivative expressions of.

Yet Notellet’s color plugs itself into its milieu in several ways, with painting being only one possibility. Sometimes color makes itself into an environment, architecturally constructing the space by folding it into its own ambiance and disposition towards the objects that inhabit it (Bruno Taut’s colorful architectures come to mind here). At times the color even dilates the capacity to perceive or use other habitual motor skills : it is the body of the spectator that is in the wandering position, displaced and filled by the surrounding excess of what he sees. And finally, sometimes the color makes itself into a painting, jubilant in monochrome while inviting blissful contemplation. Modulating a myriad of thresholds, its versatility is near endless. Each use that this milieu of color commands is never an end unto itself. Color is always mixed with something other.

On gestures

"Body am I entirely and nothing more ; and soul is only the name of something in the body." This celebrated statement of Nietzsche’s sets up a strange inclusive relation between the unknown of an equation — of something — and the soul and body. This implies that there is no part of myself, including even my bodiless reason, without a degree of animality. The soul in its most intense effectuation of thought can manifest in itself whatever effect of the body : this is called gesture.

In Nottellet’s œuvre this unknown takes a singular turn : he gives bodies to things and has their animality attest to what they have in common with humans. The most salient example of this linking is without a doubt in the life of the office chair. Juge et partie (2011) : a courtroom — or large box — is installed in the center of the room. Inside it, office chairs look out at a mural painting that seems to measure itself up on its own. It is the perfect image of state officials who, for the most part among them, are always absent when they appear in public : so too with these chairs who substitute their black bodies for those of prosecutors, just as a measuring stick substitutes itself for the balance of justice.

These office chairs, already evoked above in reference to the race and the "flirting-object", populate the work in their strange animality. Recurrent, like the universe of the office in our lives, these chairs develop an iconography that distorts our daily outlook. Not only do these accessories to our immobility act as a separable body, set aside, they also become gestures that mime the opacity and suspensions of our own. Avalanche (2006) : a black chair pierces an otherwise dignified avalanche of white paper that is uncoiling as if through a strange printing machine. Materializing the graphic dimension of every gesture, the chair’s corporeal dimension expresses the writing that participates in every such gesture.

Mur porteur (2011) at Galerie Martine et Thibaut de la Châtre : an office chair is held captive by elastics held in tension with the wall. This could be an exercise to reeducate its backrest with a painful enforcement of posture. But the chair could also want to catapult itself towards the wall face first, transformed into a living weapon. The chair plays with itself, fashioning its body as a fluctuating and non-identical object whose use is its uselessness, or rather its incitation of invention. In their ceaselessly changing attitudes, the chairs mix amongst themselves like in a test tube. The result is an inexplicable affect upon their bodies where they are abstracted from their regular function. These suspended gestures, in their quest for ever inconceivable adjustments, arrange rather than fill space : against the supposedly natural homogeneity of physical, extended space, they testify to its irreducible, digressive heterogeneity.

By way of conclusion

How did the person arrive here, stuck between the couch that he just got up from and the kitchen in which he cannot quite find himself ? By chance, like everybody. But does anyone know how they got there before they get there ? He had stumbled and lost his way, that’s it. In Nottellet’s work, art is the assault against boundaries. To lose balance is the rule. The true way forward is to pass along a taut cord that grazes the floor. Rather than leading towards any end, the cord’s purpose is to trip you up. Resolutely precarious, these evasions get their own by wreaking havoc upon all of the formattings that threaten us...