Starting from March 4th, Art on Sunday is happy to present:

Michel Nicolet: drawings, words and a sculpture

The sculptor (or should I say philosopher?) Michel Nicolet is showing us a remarkable set of objects. One could say that his presentation consists of three parts: his words, his drawings and his sculpture. The drawings, being two dimensional, appear to be a study towards a special kind of three dimensionality. After reading the words thoroughly it becomes increasingly apparent: the plans are presented on the walls of the gallery and the result is shining in the middle. It's an exhibition not to be missed!

Michel Nicolet

I was born in Switzerland in 1953. I followed the Ecole des Arts et Métiers in Architecture in Neuchâtel. I then redirect myself towards sculpture, following classes at the Ecole Supérieure d'Arts Visuels in Geneva until my diploma in 1980. For 15 years, I worked on ancient architectural monuments, rebuilding very damaged sculptures made of stone.In 1996, my family and I came to live in Auroville where I share my time between teaching arts (sculpture and drawing) and my artistic work.

To write on one's own work, for an artist, for whom the support of his experience is visual, where the imaginary of his world spontaneously translates into a visual language; is an opportunity to take time, to stop for a moment on his path, to take a necessary step back in order to find the words that will translate what the pictures tell. Everything would probably be easier if my work was built upon a preconceived concept which would stand as a basis, with the support of a predetermined idea, and for which it would be sufficient to find the most adequate form of language to objectify it. However the lines which appear on the surface of my paper mark out a virgin land which I discover at the same time as the brush or pencil at the tip of my fingers. I keep myself inwardly available, my true resource is silence, the silence of the receptive wait for the emergence of a sketch, of a first shape, like the light wave on the surface of a water body, and to feel the quality of resonance it causes deep inside myself, as the only criteria of relevance. I am a spectator of what I discover on the paper and I learn to recognize what I am secretly looking for.

The process in the creation of an art-work is a subtle alchemy which joins in its weavings, threads of various colours. Many of these threads have already been used and need to be discarded, but others, the truest and most rare, are our own and have a quality that only we are able to recognize. Work and life merge together and enrich one another through their choices, challenges, doubts and questioning, and of all which life initiates.

This inner posture of receptivity which I was talking about, directs itself as much toward the subjective inner dimension of our being as toward the manifestation of the external world in all its richness and complexity. The vast scope of meaning which life is, carries a mystery which jumps to our eyes as long as our place in the world doesn't come to us but with us. To perceive the mystery, is to start dwelling upon a question, and that question is the path itself. It is in this perspective that I situate my work and my life. My drawings represent the milestones on my life's path, significant steps guiding me on the way and, in that sense, the artistic work leads to the knowledge of oneself.

The shapes and symbols which support and organize the space of my drawings, have appeared to me as meaningful in themselves in their own representative dimension. It is the quality of their presence that is the meaning. I had to find in which graphic medium I was going to translate these symbols in the space of my paper, for the expression and content of the drawing to be as perfect and adequate as possible. “Behind” the shape, or together with the shape, we find the content of the work, its vibratory level, its level of consciousness, and it is that which subtly and secretly acts in the atmosphere of a place and of course on the spectator or onlooker.

It is vain to try to render the message of a work of art in all the too rigid limits of explanation or interpretation.

“The aim is not to discover the unknown but to realize the known. What is here is elsewhere and what is not here is nowhere.”

Michel Nicolet