Not Vital: Self-portrait as a Table (2025)
Marble 115 x 65 x 50 cm [1]
'The table as autonomous object is not merely the sum of its parts
and the ear is not merely a passive cavity or vacuous opening ...'
I.
Sometimes, you go to a gallery for one artist and leave haunted by the work of another ...
So it was I returned to Thaddaeus Ropac for the opening of a show by Liza Lou full of previously shared expectations [2] and, while her hyper-colourful fusion of glass beads and oil paint didn't disappoint, neither did it particularly excite.
On the other hand, the exhibition of work by the Swiss artist Not Vital [3] - spanning almost two decades of his practice and bringing together a selection of sculptures with his latest series of painted self-portraits - certainly captured my curiosity.
Specifically, it was
his seeming obsession with the human ear as a motif that I found fascinating.
II.
As the title of his exhibition indicates, Vital doesn't want people to merely look at his work, but listen also to what it is telling us about the art of (self) representation and the "intersections between painting, sculpture and architecture" [4].
And in order to encourage us to attend with our ears rather than just view with our eyes, it's the former that feature prominently on several of his works; playfully protruding from canvases
or, in the case of his Self-portrait as a Table (2025), adorning a tall,
veined marble surface.
As a Deleuzian philosopher and forniphile who has an interest in the becoming-object of the human being, I found this piece irresistible.
It isn't just art as furniture (or vice versa), but a zone of indiscernibility; i.e., a space wherein boundaries dissolve, differences blur, and transformative connections proliferate. Just as the artist becomes table, the table starts to sprout ears and become a new type of listening device.
III.
The English physicist A. S. Eddington famously argued there were two types of table: the tangible everyday object that we eat our dinner off; and the scientific or quantum table that is understood conceptually in terms of fast-moving atoms and empty spaces [5].
But Not Vital presents a third table - the table we discover in art and which excites the interest of object-oriented ontologists like Graham Harman; the table that is neither reduced downward to invisible particles, nor upward to a series of properties, effects, and functions.
This table we encounter in art lies somewhere between (and beyond) these two. Picasso painted it from multiple (simultaneous) perspectives [6] and Vital - amusingly - attaches ears to it. The key thing, however, is this: great artists aren't obsessed with reducing tables "either to quarks and electrons or to table-effects on humans" [7].
IV.
Finally, I'd like to say something about the ears which stick out from the surface of Vital's marble table, forming "irrational, dreamlike anatomies" [8] and prompting us to wonder why it is that since a table already possesses legs, it shouldn't also one day grow lugs ...?
There's something rather touching about the thought of old-fashioned (analogue) objects evolving the Momo-like ability to listen with genuine, time-giving sympathy and not merely the artificial intelligence of Alexa.
We desperately need a new ethics of listening, so that we might learn once more to acknowledge (and liberate) the Other in their otherness. It's poignant to imagine that Vital's table doesn't only encourage us to attend to it, but is attentive to us and prepared to lend an ear.
Although, having said that, there's always the danger that a table with ears open to every sound and sigh, might eventually become monstrous ...
Notes
[1] This work by Not Vital is included in the exhibition Listening + Looking (10 April - 23 May 2026), at Thaddaeus Ropac (London): click here for details.
[2] See the post dated 19 March that I published in anticipation of Lou's FAQ exhibition which is also showing at Thaddaeus Ropac (London) from 10 April until 23 May 2026: click here.
[3] A comprehensive biography and CV for Not Vital is available on the Thaddaeus Ropac website: click here.
In brief, he was born in Switzerland in 1948, but has spent much of his adult life travelling and living in foreign countries including China, Brazil, and the USA and his work is inspired by his nomadic lifestyle. Vital studied visual arts in Paris from 1968–71 and then moved to New York in 1974, where he began his artistic career:
"Exploring the boundaries between abstract and figurative forms, his work is marked by a particularly intimate relationship with materials, including plaster, steel, marble, ceramic and organic matter. [...] The physicality of his approach, combined with an innate understanding of his chosen materials' essential properties, results in visually challenging works that are often destabilising in their striking scale and presence."
[4] This from p. 1 of the Thaddaeus Ropac press release for Listening + Looking - click here - one assumes it was written by Nina Sandhaus (Head of Press).
[5] Eddington proposed his two table theory in his Gifford Lectures delivered at the University of Edinburgh in Jan-March 1927. These lectures formed the basis of his seminal text The Nature of the Physical World (Cambridge University Press, 1929). See the Introduction, pp. xi-xix.
Readers who are interested, can find this work published online as a Project Gutenberg ebook (2013): click here.
[6] I'm thinking here of Picasso's 1919 work La table created in a Cubist manner that attempted to represent the object on a two-dimensional canvas from all sides at once, by breaking it down into geometric components: click here.
[7] Graham Harman, The Third Table / Der Dritte Tisch, Number 085 in the dOCUMENTA (13) series '100 Notes - 100 Thoughts / 100 Notizen - 100 Gedanken', (Hatje Cantz, 2012). See my synopsis and critique of Harman's essay published on Torpedo the Ark (10 Mar 2018): click here.
[8] Thaddaeus Ropac press release for Listening + Looking, p. 2.
