Olivier Nottellet’s work is haunted by a three-headed phantom that makes light of the spaces it traverses (a sheet of paper, a wall or a room), most often under the appearance of a draughtsman. His drawings are black masses that collapse, bounce back, diffract themselves, open up and explode. They represent a complete slightly unhinged and tottering grammar, where characters sometimes emerge with black heads cluttered with objects, precarious constructions and empty frames piled up and displaced. The drawings first occupy the pages of the artist’s notebooks which he produces and exploits like material for a future adaptation. As actors of an upcoming story taking place in the space of the exhibition, they migrate from the notebooks to confront themselves with the reality of the walls. Escaping from their two-dimensional space, they produce the dialogue of their combined and fleeting presence : their appearance only lasts for the duration of the exhibition.

The space of the gallery becomes not the place of the resolution, but the formulation of a hypothesis. The viewer circulates in this space looking for a resolution that escapes while it is being constructed, evolving as in a familiar space plunged into darkness. We advance haltingly in search of a form we know, an angle we identify or a corridor which dimensions are known. Nottellet organizes mechanics of disorder that place the viewer in a position of instability, in a troubled state; a trouble that strangely reveals itself as almost soothing.

Nottellet’s work is filled with anthropomorphic elements and manufactured objects similar to clues : wheelchairs, desk lamps and tables, evoking open space, administrative buildings and the impersonal spaces of the work environment. The objects that peacefully colonize his work ressemble his drawings so much that it is impossible to know which came first.

Olivier Nottellet’s work is situated in the unclear oscillation between appearance and disappearance. The forms persist by their reminiscence beyond the visible. They sharpen the gaze without authority; they narrate a plot without conclusion nor episodes and drag in their wake a nostalgic collapse, an explosive melancholy: a phantom army that we follow with our eyes to the crossing of horizon, ever out of our reach.

Text by Claire Guezengar