All Ears: Not Vital, Listening + Looking Exhibition review
By Sammi Gale
The artist Not Vital (b. 1948) is cut from the same canvas as the surrealist René Magritte. While Magritte infamously painted a pipe only to label it ‘not a pipe’ (rather, merely a representation), Vital’s exhibition Listening + Looking at Thaddaeus Ropac offers similarly playful, record-scratch meditations on the foibles of perception. Signposting one such untrustworthy organ, a healthy dusting of human ears recurs throughout the show – as if the sculptures have been swimming in the same radioactive lake as The Simpsons’ three-eyed Blinky the fish. A tall white table has no fewer than three ears. After all, why not? Tables typically have four legs, and this one even has veins, streaking through its otherwise immaculate marble finish. In any case, this is not a table, but a Self-portrait as a Table (2025). Cue inevitable gags: Vital seems like a stand-up guy, a man of parts, etc.
The artist’s quick wittedness is held in tension with the longevity of his materials. Cast in Lasa marble is The Inside of My Left & Right Ears (2024), Vital’s auditory canals standing like mountainous peaks. A fibreglass and soap work is similarly craggy; titled 147 (2025), it has as many points as its name suggests. Alongside these forms, the use of white materials recalls the snowy surrounds of the artist’s childhood in Sent, a village in the Swiss Alps (at Yorkshire Sculpture Park in 2016, he lobbed wet handfuls of plaster at a wall, snowball-style, to make an installation).
Beyond marble and plaster, yet similarly durable and architectural — not least because they stand over three metres tall — Self-portrait with 5 ears and Self-portrait with 3 noses (both 2016) see the artist’s head sprouting from two stainless steel columns, flirting with the gallery’s high ceiling and its ornate mouldings. ‘Not long ago, it occurred to me that Sent people spend most of their time looking up,’ the artist has said. ‘That’s where the sun rises and sets, that’s where the chamois are, and that’s where the first snow falls.’ For non-Sent-based viewers, it is far easier to glimpse your own reflection in the steel than to crane your neck up toward the shiny undulations of all those eyes and ears and mouths and noses.
