Remind me to remember
The works of Nicolas H Muller often begin like a Cluedo game. A mysterious footprint left on a wall, a missing piece of a heating system found by the artist in the exhibition’s space, a block of iron reminiscent of the mount Bugarach, etc.. We want to investigate, to learn more. The question arises: “A jump rope, or perhaps a coat rack?” However, Nicolas likes to confuse the issue. He removes, adds, superimposes on images and places in order to force us to look twice rather than once, even if “it hurts the eyes”.
During the Relatives exhibition, the artist created a replica of a mural painting present for several years on one walls of the Villa Camelina (according to the wish of the owners, it cannot be removed) and superimposed it on the original. With this gesture, he masks the existing work, while giving it a new aura through its reproduction. Its title, the name and surname of the original painter and date of creation invests it with new mystery and makes reference to the memory of previous visitors. With View from the North’s window of the Villa Cameline, he worked again in situ by replacing a cracked window with a new one. The damaged window is also paradoxically highlighted. Framed and exhibited, it changes its status, becoming a work charged with ghostly reflection, reminiscence and nostalgia.
For Nicolas H Muller, the exhibition space is a game board, a medium of plenty (sometimes in the spiritual sense of the term). When he realizes the model in a cardboard version (Into the spotlight, 2010), when he photographs the sign of the square Marie-Louise / Louiza-Maria “in a square Marie-Louise” (Statement, 2009) or presents, in Storm Water (2009), a wooden board faded by water, we think we have understood the process of «mise en abyme», of tautology and self-reference. But the repetition never exhausts the image. “Erudition is memory and memory is imagination” (Max Jacob, Advice to a Young Poet, 1991).
Remind me to remember.
Marie Bechetoille
Nicolas H Muller 