Archives

Nicolas Milhé

Spartacus
09.28.12 - 10.21.12
Installation — Lieu-Commun, artist run space

Nicolas Milhé
Spartacus, installation (2012)
Courtesy Gallery Samy Abraham
Photo : Nicolas Brasseur, Le Printemps de Septembre 2012

Nicolas Milhé
Spartacus, installation (2012)
Courtesy Gallery Samy Abraham
Photo : Nicolas Brasseur, Le Printemps de Septembre 2012

Nicolas Milhé
Spartacus, installation (2012)
Courtesy Gallery Samy Abraham
Photo : Nicolas Brasseur, Le Printemps de Septembre 2012

Nicolas Milhé
Spartacus, installation (2012)
Courtesy Gallery Samy Abraham
Photo : Nicolas Brasseur, Le Printemps de Septembre 2012

Born in 1976, he lives and works in Paris. 

 

Nicolas Milhé has already inscribed a Latin word in letters of light in the skies of Paris and Bordeaux, built pyramids, but also decorated the jawbone of a hyena with gold. Each time strong gestures that make an image. Always inscribed in reality, his actions symbolically magnify universal and timeless issues. His artistic practice is not a claim, it is there to remove the walls, to act on reality by reactivating political consciousness.

 

For his monographic exhibition within the framework of the Printemps de septembre, Nicolas Milhé chooses as a tutelary reference the revolutionary couple formed by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, founders of the Spartakist League, which during and at the end of the First World War blew a wind of revolt over defeated Germany.


Their portraits are an iconic presence in the exhibition of this political spirit of protest and seem to cast a disillusioned eye over the sculptural ensemble on display here.
Minimal in appearance, the three disturbingly scaled elements form a socialised, explicit and timeless vanity that breaks free from the disembodied cliché of the endless skull box. I cannot reveal here and now what these brutal models with their partial finishes symbolise, but Nicolas Milhé manipulates here a relationship to time, to the schematised and violent representation of the life course of an average citizen from the end of the 19th century to the present day.

 

The life of which sometimes certain routines come very close to the most refined tortures, making the absolute horror generated by prison time, the imposed rhythms, the path traced straight to the grave resound (1).

 

A violent installation through its material simplicity which combines meaning with plastic presence, History is seen here through the prism of the games of domination which, from Antiquity to the present day, have unceasingly engendered movements of revolt which, although they rarely lead to change, always allow people to retain a glimmer of symbolic hope which, for example, allows art to exist despite the consumerist magma in which it is flourishing.

Manuel Pomar, July 2012.

 

"Because he [Spartacus] is the one who urges revolutionaries to act, because he is the social conscience of the revolution, he is hated, maligned, persecuted by all the secret and proven enemies of the revolution and the proletariat. Nail him to the cross, you capitalists, you petty-bourgeois...". - Rosa Luxemburg, What the Spartakist League Wants.


(1) After Spartacus, a gladiator who led a slave revolt in Rome around 1973BC. 

Echoing Paul Ardenne's programme, Lieu-Commun invites the artist Nicolas Milhé to take over the floor of the art centre.