Jean Otth (1940)
Switzerland


Biography :

Son of an architect and grandson of Alois, sculptor who became master of drawing, Jean Otth undertook classical studies which he continued at the University of Lausanne in art history. From 1961 to 1963, he studied with Jaques Berger and Albert-Edgar Yersin at the École cantonale d'art de Lausanne, where he obtained a teaching diploma. Until 1970, he practiced and exhibited a more or less abstract painting of signs which, using new supports such as the mirror or the slide, explored the modalities of image perception. In 1967 he won the painting prize from the Alice Bailly foundation, then stayed in Chicago and New York in 1969.

In 1970, as part of René Berger's course “Aesthetics and mass media” at the University of Lausanne, he undertook various practical and critical work on the language of television. He produced his first video works and showed them in 1972 in Lausanne, at the Impact gallery (Action-film-video) and at the Cantonal Museum of Fine Arts (Implosion). In 1973, on the occasion of the Art and Communication prize of which he was the winner at the São Paulo Biennale, he traveled to Brazil and toured the Amazon. Back in Switzerland, he participated in the collective and itinerant exhibition Tell 73 and, with Gina Pane, Gérard Titus-Carmel and Claude Viallat, in the Watch Elsewhere exhibition, presented at the Palais de la Bourse in Bordeaux. In 1974, he organized with the Impact group at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Lausanne the international exhibition Impact video art 74, in which Antonio Muntadas and Bill Viola participated. The following year, he spent a stay at the Marie-Louise Jeanneret international artistic experimentation center in Boissano, Italy. Since then, his participation in numerous video art meetings in Europe and the United States has earned him international recognition.

A part-time drawing teacher at the Morges college, he has taught since 1979 at the Lausanne cantonal art school. The 1980s marked a return to painting. Then in 1985, he produced his first computer-assisted works and, from 1990, projected infographic images. From 1992 to 1995, he directed a workshop of the Digital Image Synthesis Unit as part of the Cantonal Art School.

Fascinated by new image production technologies, Jean Otth often refers in his work to the history of art, literature, human sciences and even the language and concepts of sciences such as astrophysics. But it is the Platonic myth of the cave and its perceptual and aesthetic implications which seem to have, from the mirror paintings (1966), guided his approach until today. Experimental and critical, his work addresses the reality of the image and the relationships of uncertainty it maintains with its object and its receptacle. In the series “TV-perturbations” (Perturbations II: Strip Tease TV, 1972) for example, he questions the nature of the television image by deconstructing its codes, while in the series “Limites” (Limite E, 1973), it highlights its different levels of reality. With the Mirror Videos and, in particular, with Dürer's Gate (1977), he offers a synthesis of doing and seeing by bringing together in a single space and a single time the model (the woman), the painter (her image in action) and the support (the monitor).

Subsequent painting works such as Painted Images (1984), Crystal and Smoke (1989), Wart (1991), then the computer graphics projected on the occasion of the exhibition Black Holes and White Fountains (1994,) do not escape this questioning of the limits of the work, of the border between its inside and its outside, between its concrete reality and its dematerialization, between its conception and its perception, and proceed from this same dialectic of the real and the imaginary, of the being and appearance of the image, which nourishes the artist's entire research.

Institutional collections (selection): La Chaux-de-Fonds, Museum of Fine Arts; Lausanne, art collection of the City of Lausanne; Lausanne, Cantonal Museum of Fine Arts; Geneva, Cantonal Contemporary Art Fund; Geneva, Contemporary Art Fund of the City of Geneva; Geneva, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art [MAMCO]; Paris, Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris. (Source, website, SIK)

Works :
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Country