People / Projects / Objects

Catherine Ferbos-Nakov
Independent Curator

Rounded shapes, pierced through, stretched, emptied out, circles of colour or of silver, the roundness of a bread basket or the seats at the Top Cloud restaurant in Seoul, the round forms of a little chair or a Sèvres vase and then in counterpoint the lines of the contemporary escritoire desk, so delicate that they seem to fly away; the dreamy "wondrous clouds" of her lamp-shade or the infinitely discreet, finely adjusted indispensable presence of her interior architecture or her scenographies - every piece of Mathilde Bretillot's work fixes our gaze, forces us to ask questions: they challenge us.

We just have to take time, look, think about them or simply dare first of all to want to become familiar with them, then to get to understand them and appropriate them for ourselves, like the latest Vermeil necklaces, with their attractive, asymmetrical extended shapes, for wearing and fondling, stunning messengers of every aspect of this real work.

Mathilde Bretillot's realisations are multiple in a number of ways, and they embrace and reveal the solid classic teaching she received in drawing and interior architecture as well as the specific aspects of the different cities where she chose to visit or to live, and the various personalities with whom she has collaborated. Camondo, Milan, London and Paris, or Martine Bedin, Ross Lovegrove and Philippe Starck have in turn nurtured each of her facets and above all enabled her to express, through her objects, her interior design or her classes given at the Ecole de Reims, the originality and the quality of her personal plastic expression, based partly on what she has to say (or to do, rather), and partly on the exchanges she generates with other people and which draw her on to further projects, further discourses, new quests and and new works.

Catherine Ferbos-Nakov
October 2009

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