Levitation: Nathalie Junod Ponsard and Hans Kotter | Patrick Heide Contemporary Art
Just like Joseph Kosuth, whose works in neon I featured last week, Nathalie Junod Ponsard’s art is about achieving simple light effects through everyday materials. Both artists share a sense of austerity. Both would agree that to be fancy in their materials is to obscure their meaning. But where Kosuth is icily intellectual and concept-first, Ponsard’s art is more down-home, even shabby.
Patrick Heide Contemporary Art, where Ponsard is currently showing, is a gallery in a slightly rundown, sticky-carpeted Georgian house off the Edgware Road. The signature work pictured below, Levitation, is in a first-floor room, facing the street. The floorboards are a bit creaky. The bookshelves are teetering. There’s a kitchen just over the hall, the fridge door loaded with holiday magnets, coffee cups in the sink.
Such domestic surroundings are also a world away from the spick-and-span international gallery hosting Kosuth down the road. And they lend something to Ponsard’s installation. Levitation is made of coloured strips of gelatin, one purplish, one yellow, attached - not quite fully - to the narrow, 200-year-old sash windows.
They flop and crease and spool across the floor, like too-big curtains. Where they overlap, they cast a maroon shade into the room. The overall effect is a bit scruffy - by design, I’m sure. Looking out, we see a very normal London street, a bit down-at-heel considering how central it is, with its daily market, its shoals of litter, its cracked kerbs.
Ponsard’s art, which has recently included some site-specific works at the Paris Olympic village, is all about rendering familiar scenes as something new and strange, using coloured light. I mentioned Kosuth because I’ve just seen him, but she also reminded me of Ann Veronica Janssens in her play with colours and light effects.
On a quiet Tuesday afternoon in late February, looking out of a window through gelatine strips, here purple, there yellow, there maroon, I felt some of that strangeness. Maybe not quite the “hypnotic, dreamlike environment” the show notes promised, but there was a sense of something ineffable among the wonky bookshelves and the empty coffee cups. She did her job.
Levitation: Nathalie Junod Ponsard and Hans Kotter is at Patrick Heide Contemporary Art (London). 24 January - 01 March 2025