SOURDRE
NICOLAS BOURTHOUMIEUX
UNTIL DECEMBER 13, 2025
LA VERRIERE
The Chair of Nicolas
It is not often that we are presented with a chance to sit down in an exhibition space that isn’t a big museum. The economy of space, I suppose, the unspoken understanding that no one would linger in a gallery.
When chairs are part of the artwork, you may be allowed to use them, at your own risk of becoming an artwork too. Or at the price of activating a dispositif of a sort. Which, to be fair, can sometimes be charming. For example, in the case of Willem Oorebeek and Aglaia Konraad, I willingly accepted to go through the process, however quick, of choosing from a congregation of school chairs to sit down and look at a video of ants. I knew then, I was completing a larger picture, sharing a certain irony with the artists. I have most certainly exaggerated a hunchback of a bad student too, and put a particularly absent look on my face as the insects kept crawling.
On another happy participative occasion, I went as far as asking to be photographed while sitting on the chair “Caesarina” by Mathias Pfund. It was part of The Sculpture Biennale in Geneva, back in 2022. I didn’t mind playing the perfect public: all, from the title to the warm weather, was inviting to behave nicely. A throne-like but light structure evoking the laurel wreath was attached to a little pedestal and then placed on a curvy open hill facing the lake. It took my turn to be ridiculous and graceful for a second, straighten my back, overlook the nature around with the squint of a strategist.
In both mentioned cases, I accepted to fit the suggested environment, play along, a touch too aware of how it looks from the outside.
A different, surprisingly internal, if not to say selfish experience was that of sitting on a chair of Nicolas Bourthoumieux in the exhibition of La Verrière. First of all, it was really very comfortable, rather low. My knees were higher than usual, which, for once, made me feel like a tall person. The chair was not completely still: some mobility at the bottom created a light suspended sensation, contributing to further relaxation. With the Hermes shop nearby, it is beneficial to take a posture of someone “at ease”. The chair has a constructivist air to it, a distant relative of Lygia Clark, made of darkened metal. It was telling me: ”use me, I am a functional structure, my forms won’t impose a predetermined identity, become whoever…”
And it was all true, except, predetermined was the placement of the chair. Very much facing two sculptures, one by Marie Talbot, another by Claudine Monchaussé. For a while, it was pleasant to look at them just like that, side by side, pretty much ignoring the rest of the exhibition. So perfectly same-sized, very different: one gleaming with finer detailed features, the other more paradoxically brutally refined. However, after a while of that encounter, it started to feel like I was facing the tip of the so-called “swine array” triangle. The army of little sculptures was still agitating in the middle of the space, unlooked at, mixed media works holding the periphery…the now familiar front line sculptures appeared more and more confrontational, menacing even. That was the cue to lift my bottom. Reluctantly doing so, I thought, how wonderful it would be, to keep my warm seat and make it roll gently by means of little foot steps, from hill to toe!
Polina Akhmetzyanova