(In)formal conversations

Thierry de Beaumont
Author, journalist, teacher

The launch of the Furnishing programme award has VIA introducing an exacting new challenge. For to design a ‘set’ at a time when periods and styles are constantly recurring, proliferating, hybridizing and then dying out again, and when the visual references enabled by digital tools are more disparate than ever, is both a necessary gamble and a delicate, absorbing
task. Underlying this new VIA assignment is the principle ‘assemble rather than resemble’, which questions design fundamentals and in doing so confirms their importance.

For the maiden run, Mathilde Bretillot steps into the breach with Parades, a proposal that embraces the venture intimately. She has developed her own ‘manner’, blending experience and intuition. This is what is known as talent, a concept that may seem outdated but which remains vital.

The first thing her resolution defines is space. In other words, the Grail of all creators, which has an exasperating way of vanishing the moment we try to grasp it. Like a magician, she begins by drawing an ellipse to form a ring that pulls everything
together: a curtain of lights hung from the ceiling, where no one expects it to be. Made of paper, aerial and flimsy, it is nonetheless the founding gesture in space, prefiguring the combination of dissimilarities, delineating a stage-like swath of light, a vacant presence.

Swiftly the designer sets down an ‘an armful of pieces’. A family of seven elements starts to articulate: their intrusive identities clamouring for light and living space, each arguing an important function. Mathilde Bretillot gives them free rein:
her intervention is just an outline, as if Parades were a project already latent, waiting to be revealed. Before they could exist confidently within the halo of light, all the players had to have an appropriate costume. Costuming a piece of furniture rather
than covering it was an idea the designer lifted from a book about the early 20th century Russian Ballets. It had illustrations of the work done by artists like André Masson, De Chirico, Picasso and Matisse, to mention only them, in particular the costumes they designed for famous troupes doing world tours. She wanted to use textile finishes to ensure the overall coherence of her set, and even to paint sublimated patterns on fabric herself. The furnishing textiles that she created
express refinement, with flounced seams hand-sewn by an upholsterer. Another thing she took from the artist-designed ballet costumes was a subtle redistribution of scale and the composing of patterns. The ideal support for this kind of intervention
was the duo of Loveuses lounge chairs, enlaced in complementary array centre stage. In the history of modern art, another precedent comes to mind : the spontaneous fabrics designed by Sonia Delaunay, an artist passionately
committed to breaking down the barriers between fine art and the applied arts. The painter and the designer are both women of character determined to re-shuffle the cards, and both prefer feeling to intent. But Mathilde Bretillot does not see
pattern as the aesthetic link that brings the set together. Each player has a coloured costume made for the role: sunshine yellow chair, gravel-tinted low table, water green Berceuse (cradle). The sensual mini-theatre of Parades comes to life as
characters come onto the stage. Like the blades of a propeller, two assert verticality : Psyché, the mirror whose two sloping faces scatter space, and Voile de lumière, the luminous curtain with its velvety light filtered by grain-surfaced paper. In their
functions of reflecting and lighting, this symbolic couple frames the set of Parades: they are like the castles on a chess board, which can only be moved before or after the game. The sun-deck sofas and stone-top table bring us back to more
conventional postures. Designed as interlacing curves, their lines remind us of a magic carpet: they suggest ‘happy hours’, a support for a laptop or an armful of lilies. As for the Berceuse, it is a new moon waiting for a Little Prince, a snug nook in a surround of oval cushions.

This recomposed family, which corresponds by echoes, tells us something about the strategy deployed by a creator designing a suite of furniture for today. How can harmony be expressed other than by repetition? The spirit of the decorator-designers that was brushed aside by the tyranny of egocentric design-label pieces in the 1990s comes back here in precise images: the set of flounced ovoid pieces that Jean Royère designed for the cosy interior of a wholesaler in eggs, and which inspired his famous egg armchair, or the notes of music done in marquetry for jazz singer Henri Salvador in 1955. Besides using a leitmotiv with humour, Royère was also setting his own standards for modernity: self-taught, he distrusted styles and fashions. Harmony governed everything that he did. Even earlier, Jean-Michel Frank, whose pieces have recently been re-produced, resolved the surfaces of his rigorously pure lines in ‘raw’ materials: sharkskin, parchment, moleskin or jute cloth. Luxury for Frank was the height of simplicity.

Contemporary creators who give in to nostalgia have things easy: all they need to do is throw together a few items borrowed from ‘modern modernity’ and their work is done. Their project resources go back to pre-Perec, pre-Baudrillard days. But essentials have changed since then. Today, the main thing is to ensure that whoever sits down, uses a table, logs on or uses a keyboard does so in good conditions. The real ‘inhabitant of an interior’ knows how to sidetrack functions and profiles. He or she may eat at any hour, lie on the divan with a laptop open on his or her knees, make love in the kitchen, put on make-up in the hall, read in the bath. This is a person who wants to be free, who prefers what is real to what passes as authentic, who wants moral comfort rather than an English club armchair. In the places he or she lives in, there is respect for pure emotion, the kind provided by artists who have cast aside restraints.

Mathilde Bretillot has devised for them a set they are free to interpret, one that is fluid and persistent as a pop tune, like that one people whistled in the 1990s: ‘Don’t worry, be happy’… Exit mannerism, co-ordinates, the tyranny of the icon and of the Pantone® matching system. Emotion floods thought, in the same way as the creator lays down a ‘surge’ of sensations that cross a wide spectrum, from suite to unit. She would have painted the patterns on her Loveuses herself had it been possible. By giving back in design the visual store of her thought, she answers people soul to soul, suggests a posture, reveals herself and sets us free.

Thierry de Beaumont
January 2012

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