‘‘INCONSOLABLE’’

NATHALIE ELEMENTO

Silent Pranks

Art is not the expression of abstract elements; it must also embrace the expression of more concrete elements and the most private demands of the individual.

Eileen Gray et Jean Badovici, « de l’eclectisme au doute »,

in E 1027. Maison en bord de mer, 

special issue of L’Architecture vivante, 1929

Nathalie Elemento has developed a body of works composed of objects that have sometimes been described as domestic, because they are functional and practical. The use of everyday objects - tables, consoles, desks, shelves, surfaces perforated with ‘‘phantom’’ threads in the manner of fabric seams - is part of a mental and temporal architecture: a psychic space reflecting customs and practices, a form of “inner furnishings” which remains in motion. 

Elemento considers the object’s positive space as one would approach an individual’s intimacy crossed with inner moves and mental postures. Life experiences enable the psychic space, unique and shared, to take on various forms and shapes: open and expansive, closed and reclusive. For instance, the closed face one turns towards the ground when mourning reflects their emotional withdrawal. The Consolations (2022) series, as in many of her art pieces, explores how intertwined tangible and mental spheres are. These wall sculptures in an alert state (en éveil) are pierced with dashed lines. Tracing light like a sundial, these virtual seams are a new temporal marker of the multiplied psychic becoming. Similar to a cardboard box and its volume combines, the Consolations represent the complex and evolving nature of the psyche, with holes and corners allowing colours to spread as if to narrate their interiorities in time and diffract their intimate environments. Gilbert (2022) is sleeping (en veille), while the Consolations are alert with their raised relief and active engagement. The sculpture Simon (2020) serves as a fortification, shaping its base. These potential postures form as many psychic folds in which memories and recollections are raised or compressed, sometimes unnoticed, in an invisible movement.

Thanks to the sculpture’s clarity, interpolation can occur between the inside and the outside, with light and colour playing a pivotal role. Jean-Luc Nancy questioned how subjectivity comes about through what he calls an ‘‘edge of reality’’ humans face in the social realm. For Elemento, it all begins with the observation of the house as an ‘interior’ that can encapsulate so many uses and social relationship. Just as in the writings of Sigmund Freud or Walter Benjamin («The Interior, the Trace», in The Arcades Project, 1939), the interior is approached as an interiority, or even, in Elemento’s case, as corners of interiorities. The emphasis is on the psyche of the domestic space, but this is not to be confused with the qualifications of comfort. As Walter Benjamin points out, this word “used to mean consolation (‘Comforter’ is the epithet applied to the Holy Spirit). Then the sense became, instead, well-being. Today, in all languages of the world, the word designates nothing more than rational convenience”. In this allegedly intimate space, the decorum question is an inherently ethical and political notion that plays a significant role. Decorum is the English word for good form, i.e. what is appropriate in social situations (quod deceat), while, similarily, we decorate someone to honour them. In sum, all objects, even the most trivial, bear an imprint whose phantasmagorical and social character Benjamin had revealed.

For the Mobilier National’s Les Aliénés project, focusing on rehabilitating discarded objects, Nathalie Elemento selected a decommissioned table to be reintegrated into the institution’s collections. What dialogue is at play? How should we approach this ornamented piece? The artist’s mirror insertion simultaneously fractures and unites. Effectively shifting the initial ironic and aggressive face-to-face towards an intermediate volumetric work, the cleaved object becomes as open as unconsolable in its infinite perspectives. Unlike a traditional pedestal, which is never neutral and always enthrones the elevated piece, the sculptor uses the table as an “ideal base”. Perhaps because the table can fade away behind the objects on it, without any physical or temporal hierarchy.

The delicate interplay between the visible and invisible, the remembered and the forgotten, grows within oneself and forms the gaze. Within this fold, the sculpture’s spatiality questions the time continuities of emotion and memory, constituting traces through which everything is connected and merged. Within the multi-layered and given experience, one must seize variations to become aware of what is at stake. The sculptures’ proper nouns act as a conflicting tour de force. The essential unity of a name is illusory, specifically when the objects and individuals do not have the precise limits we attribute to them, as Bergson states: “Such is the primary and the most apparent operation of the perceiving mind: it marks out divisions in the continuity of the extended, simply following the suggestions of our requirement and the needs of practical life” (Matter and memory, 1896). In Elemento’s work, the specific name is “no way the indicator of a subject” (Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus, 1980). Instead, it is an incentive to become. A work’s name is no longer a consistency but a performance: it witnesses the subtilities of a continuous reality. Naming is to envelop, touch, and reconnect with the uninterrupted flow of space. 

Olivier Zeitoun

Deputy director at the design division, MNAM-CCi, Centre Pompidou

Translated into English by Emma Sophie Joynt