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PERFORMING SPACE

 Based on a premise defined by the physical properties of colours on our perception, from the earliest stages of a project Nathalie Junod Ponsard sees the venue and its context as a painting. Chromatic scales, transcribed into wavelengths, allow the eye to adapt little by little to colour. The venue—thanks to its architectural qualities and also its purpose, its functionality—becomes a setting in which the artist works, seeing the installation primarily as a receptive process.Immersing visitors in constructed abstraction transforms the exhibition space into a landscape or environment to be inhabited. The principal themes of modernity are played out in this space: the interaction of that which moves things (bodies, time) with that which is static (the space itself); the “meta-morphosis”1 of the container by what it contains; impermanence; the dissolution of the art object and its removal from the exhibition space in counterpoint to its habitual transformation into merchandise, harking back to performance art, artistic protocols and Land Art. Nathalie Junod Ponsard melds the venue and the artwork into a cohesive whole comprising two connected entities that can no longer be conceived separately (Lampes à souder les vagues magnétisées (1985)). She uses the substance of light like a paintbrush that both conceals and reveals space and the forms that occupy it. Examples are the exhibition titled Thickness of Light (2013) at the Espace Fondation EDF, where alternating red and blue light, followed by eleven other colour/light pairings, concealed and revealed the space, and Tribute to Mark Rothko at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome (2007). Light is the intangible source of life and the instrument of visibility. Each wavelength or colour acts upon the bodies that come into contact withit like a pharmakon (a drug or potion), turning it into a transitional instrument that provides the viewer with the keys to a new form of perception. The artworks are the result of research carried out by the artist, who used different wavelengths to experiment with the effects produced by colour and the way it is received, both physically (dazzle, loss of balance, dizziness, etc.) and mentally (thought, meditation, etc.). Nathalie Junod Ponsard’s practice reveals her chosen environments and the way they mesh more or less organically with our existence.

  • This text is part of the general text accompanying the monograph ‘Nathalie Junod Ponsard, Light as a second skin’, which introduces and explains the artist’s works in their context.
    Editions Pyramyd, 2022

1 – The word is used here in its primary sense, and as part of a portemanteau word: the prefix meta means “beyond” or “above” (as in metalanguage, for example), but also “about itself” (an exhibition about exhibitions); in role play, the term refers to an action based on information the player has, but which the character is not supposed to have.