Jean Otth: Spaces of Projection

Jean Otth: Spaces of Projection

June 18–September 12, 2021

A pioneer of video art in Switzerland, Jean Otth (1940–2013), in the 1960s, began using the visual possibilities being made available by the new technologies of the day, i.e., the slide as a projected and dematerialized image; television and its particular idiom; and the shifting experimental character of video. Whether working with moving images, painting, drawing, or installations, it is the questions and issues of representation itself that lie at the heart of Jean Otth’s experiments more than his attachment to any one medium in particular.

The show offers an overview of nearly 50 years of artmaking, all mediums included. It allows to take stock of both the depth and diversity of a body of work that is centred on the dialectic tension between representation and nonrepresentation, visibility and obliteration, presence and absence, in an endlessly renegotiated balance on the shifting line that marks the limit. Painted (on canvas, paper, mirrored glass), drawn (in pencil, spray paint, gloss paint), manipulated (with the use of a monitor and video, and later with the computer and its screen), and projected (on the wall, paper, objects), the image as a recording of reality can by turns be seen and drop out of sight, be present and go missing. For it is the very possibility of its materialization, and hence visibility, which is at play in Jean Otth’s work. The female body and the desire to see or, more precisely, the desire to know formed the visible pivot of his questioning for a long stretch of his career. Experimentation with different mediums was an attempt to enlarge the space of possibilities and would lead to the abstraction of his video installations over the last decade of his career.

Curated by Nicole Schweizer, curator of contemporary art, MCBA.