Celebrating French talent
With each edition, Paris design fair Maison&objet shines a light on a new generation of designers from a specific country. For the January 2020 fair, M&O took a look at its homegrown French talent.
After Italy, Lebanon, China and the United States in recent times, the January 2020 edition of the Rising Talent Awards celebrates five designers and a duo from France, selected by an acclaimed jury under the auspices of the French Ministry of Culture. This year’s Maison&objet Rising Talent Award winners are:
Wendy Andreu
The focus of Wendy Andreu’s work is the exploration of materials. “I like the weight, the texture and the smell of things,” she says. She studied metalwork at the Ecole Boulle in Paris before moving on to the Design Academy in Eindhoven. It was there that she started to develop Regen (“rain” in Dutch), a series of objects made from a highly innovative material consisting of cotton fibres and latex wrapped around custom laser-cut steel moulds. The resulting waterproof fabric earned her the Dorothy Waxman Textile Design Prize during New York’s Textile Month in 2017. Andreu initially used the fabric to create a series of handmade bags, hats and raincoats, all of which are difficult to acquire. In more recent times, she has also started to transform it into large, cushion-like chairs.
Natacha and Sacha
“We want to bring design to fields where it’s not necessarily expected today,” says Natacha Poutoux, one half of the Parisbased design duo Natacha and Sacha. With her associate Sacha Hourcade, she focuses in particular on re-imagining household electronic goods – objects they believe are far too often left for engineers to devise. Eschewing plastic, they take pains to integrate other materials into their creations. A part-glass air humidifier looks almost like a sculptural vase, while a portable hard drive made from ceramic has a form that provides natural convection.
Mathieu Peyroulet Ghilini
One of Mathieu Peyroulet Ghilini’s principal design concerns is why an object has a certain form rather than another. It was a notion he investigated in detail with Sophistication, in which he came up with four distinct trestles. “They’re all quite different aesthetically, but all created by the same person,” he says. The project earned Peyroulet Ghilini the Grand Jury prize at the Design Parade at the Villa Noailles in 2013. His work tends to be somewhat enigmatic. Peyroulet Ghilini generally favours simple geometric forms, avoids trying to establish an identifiable aesthetic and has a particular love of drawings, which he sees as a way of investigating forms independently of the constraints of the process of production.
Laureline Galliot
Referring to herself as a “designer and painter,” Galliot uses new technology to create objects in which colour plays a predominant role. “I want to turn on its head the paradigm that dictates that colour is only a finishing touch,” she says. “I work with it as a material.” She conceives her designs either by drawing with her fingers on an ipad or by donning a virtual reality headset and using software originally developed for cartoon animation. In both instances, she has no preconceived idea of the form of the final object. She allows herself instead to be guided by the virtual brushstrokes as they appear.
Adrien Garcia
Designer Adrien Garcia describes himself as “a wild and sociable man.” Garcia splits his time between Paris and a dilapidated castle near Nantes in the west of France. “I need its empty, run-down spaces in order to imagine new creations,” he says. An example is an oak bench based on a fifteenth-century model he found in its chapel. He makes much of his furniture out of oak trees felled on the property. He is currently developing his first furniture collection in a “quite austere, sculptural” style partly inspired by land artists like Andy Goldsworthy, and he favours finely balanced proportions and materials, such as wood and steel.
Julie Richoz
Julie Richoz first made her mark by winning the Grand Jury prize at the Design Parade at the Villa Noailles in 2012; she opened her Paris-based studio the following year. She has since created objects for some of Europe’s leading design firms, including Alessi and Louis Poulsen. The LP Cité consists of six curved shades arranged in a rhythmical configuration. “I like the idea of repetition,” she says, “but with subtle variations.” Richoz is inspired by curved forms and avows a fascination with coloured glass, a material she first explored with her Oreilles (“ear”) vases. “One of the beautiful things about glass is the way light passes through the material,” she says. A