A DVD documenting a commissioned work for which Jean-Michel Othoniel redesigned spaces housing the sacred treasures of the Angoulême Cathedral.
The Trésor of the Angoulême Cathedral, begun in 2008 and completed in 2016, is a monumental creation by French artist Jean-Michel Othoniel, who redesigned spaces housing more than 200 objects and liturgical sculptures, largely dating back to the nineteenth century. The Trésor, a magnificent showcase for these cult objects that spans three rooms and 200 square meters. The film by Gilles Coudert and Damien Faure, which explores the voyage of the Trésor's creation through interviews with Jean-Michel Othoniel as well as visits to the workshops of numerous artisans who collaborated on the project and who shed light on the lengthy process involved in producing this major work of art.
Born 1964 in Saint-Étienne (France), Jean-Michel Othoniel lives and works in Paris. His 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 almost architectural 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.
