Eric Michel by Rebecca François
The work of Eric Michel is apprehended by successive layers of sensations. Because if the conceptual art crosses its work, this one remains intimately bound to the domain of the feeling. His quest for the immaterial is not a pure abstraction. Each installation is a way to experience it. The artist questions our relationship to the real, playing on the border of the material and the immaterial, as an intermediary, a “smuggler”, according to his words (*). But Eric Michel is well aware of the inaccessibility of the goal he has set. The only thing that counts for him is exploration. The journey prevails over the purpose. Unlike the charismatic Yves Klein who offered us the “ashes of his art”, Eric Michel is determined to share his physical and spiritual experiences.
First of all, the haptic dimension of his work is surprising and this feeling of “touching the eyes” invades us. To this purely physical effect is added an emotion, an inner resonance. The illuminating light source, which reveals a recurrent question in art history, becomes a subject in itself and finds its magnetic power in monochrome and fluorescent colors. Far from revealing a sanitized universe, neons and pure pigments, inherited from the aesthetics of the seventies, create a neutral transcendental atmosphere. This “light bath” gives space a dimension quite different and feeds the ambivalence between fascination and withdrawal. The artist destabilizes our perception and manages to create “special visual states” as Donald Judd said about Dan Flavin.
The materiality of the light absorbs us until we plunge into a deep immersion conducive to meditation. This same impregnation phenomenon that James Turrell implements in his installations. There too we refuse any pathos. No visualization of a feeling, let alone an inner self. The subject is evacuated for the benefit of the effect. Eric Michel invites us to experience the depth; but what is Depth if not something ineffable?
Rebecca FRANCOIS
Historian of contemporary art
Assistant Commissioner of the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Nice
