IN 3 by Jean Verville

IN 3, Domestic architectural installation, Montréal, Canada Jean Verville
Photography by Maxime Brouillet

Typewriter Guns by Éric Nado

The material world was built, first and foremost: one of the roles art can take is of reinterpreting its forms and functions. Through sculpture-assemblage, Éric Nado transforms and reorganizes certain objects to reveal other possibilities through their forms or intended functions. Using iconic metal objects such as typewriters and sewing machines, Nado materializes concepts such as labor and memory. Filled with nostalgia, the objects transformed into sculptures tell compelling stories.

Typewriter Guns, by Éric Nado, at Galerie C.O.A

Photography: Stone Heroes by Léo Caillard

Stone Heroes, by Léo Caillard

Copper in Motion by Larose Guyon

Larose Guyon developed a design for New York-based Rockwell Group’s brand new EMC2 Hotel in Chicago and came up with an interactive sculpture that combines ingenuity, art and science.

An Old Technology Born Anew
In revisiting the zoetrope, a forerunner to cinema invented in 1834 by William George Horner and Simon von Stampfer, Larose Guyon were inspired to create their own new way to animate objects. Forty-four pairs of laser-cut copper wings are arranged inside a large wheel which is cranked by hand. Looking inside while turning the hand crank will give life to the otherwise motionless display.

The usually cold and inert materials suddenly become light and alive. The crank handle, itself a lacework flower, brims with femininity and romanticism. The wings move in three dimensions, leaving the onlooker in awe of such a captivating sight. This work is a mere reminder that inventions of old are still something to marvel at, if you only let your inner child take over for a little while.

Copper in Motion, by Larose Guyon

Exhibition: Jonathan Muecke & Juliaan Lampens

For its seventh furniture series, MANIERA invited the American designer Jonathan Muecke to a residency in Belgium. The one-week stay was to take place in specific architectural surroundings with the aiming of being an inspiring source for the designer, as Henry Van de Velde’s Wolfers House was for Richard Venlet’s MANIERA 03. From a number of possibilities that MANIERA offered Muecke, the designer almost immediately chose the Van Wassenhove House by the Belgian architect Juliaan Lampens.

Jonathan Muecke & Juliaan Lampens, Maniera Gallery

Exhibition: Spring by Mathieu Lehanneur

In his ‘Spring’ exhibition at Carpenters Workshop Gallery in London, Mathieu Lehanneur takes us into a world of flux. As if the cycle of the seasons and nature’s forces have specially looked at the fate of objects… Here, the artist-designer with a passion for science, grapples with ancestral materials in order to suffuse them with plasticity, fluidity and tone.

The works in the ‘Spring’ exhibition seem to hesitate between solid, liquid and gaseous. They appear to be suspended mid-transformation in a poetic state of metamorphosis. Marble and aluminium become liquid, onyx becomes air and glass softens as in a return to its original state.

Mathieu Lehanneur: ‘Spring’ exhibition, (17 – 25 September 2016), at Carpenters Workshop Gallery, London

Exhibition: Konstantin Grcic: Hieronymus

As humanity finds itself more and more exploded and human beings are less and less (or increasingly) aware of themselves in the “coming community” of unidentified unity- seeking entities deciphered by Giorgio Agamben, Konstantin Grcic’s series from Da Messina’s Saint Jerome represents a significant contribution to the displacement of the issue of the individual. In these five pieces of furniture, the way the sitter positions himself is always an open question: there is, in each of the pieces, a choice to be made between the several places to sit; there is in every case a need to accept, with the angles of the seats and the curve of the legs, a certain tension.

There is no discomfort, but challenge in comfort, exactly as we should not let ourselves limit ourselves in ourselves, but in fact should expand, exercise our abilities in order to expand our world. The five items are all a small pedestal – a stage, seemingly separating us from the world; and there is a certain amount of theatricality in each of them, by mean of the materials used; fibre-cement, aluminium, marble, 3D print, all make for quite an effect. But at the same time there is no weight that would locate them beyond the logics of life: they all remain in the human community, and do not seem to escape into another world.

Exhibition: Hieronymus, at Galerie kreo, Paris, March 23 – July 14, 2016

Distance(s) by Pedro Léger Pereira

Exhibition: distance(s), Lisboa, Portugal, by Pedro Léger Pereira

The Bauhaus #itsalldesign by Vitra Design Museum

With the major exhibition »The Bauhaus #itsalldesign« (26.09.2015 – 28.02.2016), the Vitra Design Museum presents, a comprehensive overview of design at the Bauhaus for the first time. The exhibition encompasses a multiplicity of rare, in some cases never-before-seen exhibits from the fields of design, architecture, art, film and photography. At the same time, it confronts the design of the Bauhaus with current debates and tendencies in design and with the works of contemporary designers, artists and architects. In this way, “The Bauhaus #itsalldesign” reveals the surprising present-day relevance of a legendary cultural institution.

The Bauhaus #itsalldesign, by Vitra Design Museum

Shadovvs by Matt W. Moore

Moore constructed a new body of work that fuses his bold, graphic, op-geo vocabulary with extruded mosaic forms that bring the works to life in three dimensions. The series is activated by the angle and intensity of the light source, be it a deliberate directional lamp, or the natural curve of each day’s sun cycle. Symmetries and depth are revealed in a spectrum of proportions, and color palettes are expanded upon, into numerous parallel hues revealed by the shadows.

The exhibition is comprised of 5 chapters, each with its own concept and aesthetic. A series of greyscale cut-paper mosaics created in Montreal in Fall 2014 is displayed as evidence of the explorations that led to the layered sensibilities of the more elaborate colorful works created during this Bay Area residency. A series of 4 pure symmetry colorful compositions reminiscent of sacred geometry grids, timeless diamond cuts, and architectural monuments hangs as a family on one side of the space. Opposite this wall is a series of 12 square works that bring Moore’s signature graphic syntax into three dimensions, playing with the eye when viewed from different vantage points. One extra large modular construct composed of 5 pieces that hang synchronized is displayed void of color to allow the viewer to explore the subtle nuances of light and shadow without the distraction of color.

On the back two walls of 886 Geary Gallery, Moore has constructed a large mosaic dimensional mural comprised of the same forms used in the rest of the series. This in-situ installation has been left to chance and intuition, with Moore opting to freestyle the build spontaneously rather than reference drafted blueprints.

Shadovvs, Artist Residency & Exhibition, San Francisco, California, by Matt W. Moore, for 886 Geary Gallery
Photography by 886 Geary Gallery and Matt W. Moore