If Nicolas H Muller is not bishop Ecclesius, he also arrives loaded with a model. Nothing to envy
the Byzantine splendor, ours is cardboard, put on the ground with a suspicion of casualness.
Some cuts, pieces bound to make walls, a little adhesive tape and three points of glue, the object is there, permanently. Restricted in the concrete, this enactment holds place of first clue. Temple was set up in the alder of an economy of means and modest production, it results from a cyclical choice of medium, the one that we all have at hand, free newspaper, shoe box, box of pizza or broken window. The simple gesture of the recovery, the recycling, shone, but in Nicolas H Muller’s researches, it is disconnected from the stakes in the ready made. This cardboard, raw material with over utilitarian usage, selected with less naivety than the artist indeed wants to let us believe, acts as architect’s tool.
L’endroit du décor dresses, as number of Nicolas Muller’s works, a very sober configuration,
purified in its lines, which is worth in situ of the place of monstration. Paradoxically, this modernist radicality of the shape takes sense here only in a specific context, reduced to a cardboard skeleton which resolves effectively the question of the representation. Sculpture effigy, replica all the more, it produces backwards a collision between two orders of reality: the symbolic, magic value of presentation of the mental space of the exhibition and the physical reality of the gallery.
Puppet in a doll’s house, the scale of the one comes to give its measure to the other one and
leaves to the visitor the care of connecting the cause with the effect. Joined into the set and
into the context, he does not have more than to compare the reality and his reproduction, the
representation and his presentation. An ultimate return in the physical space of the exhibition
(ground, ceiling, walls) allows to resolve a part of the enigma. These pieces of words, painted
on walls, were not by coincidence there. Every letter, initially present on the cardboard used for
the model, was scrupulously put back in its equivalent localization in the gallery. The game of
comings and goings continues between the enactment and his source, giving to seize the sensitive impact of the experience, the tension between these two «galleries», in a physical relationship of dependence and mutual reconfiguration.
The space exhibition preceded in the realization of the work, then the protocol put in the work in
this last one has reconfiguré the reality from which it arose. The question of the interchangeability of the place, the work and the medium asks then, when the contents and the means form each other, intensifying in a tautological way the process of development of the art for a given or chosen context.
Claire Migraine, about L’endroit du décor
Nicolas H Muller 