Springtime in Paris
There was a moment, early in the pandemic, when the bell seemed to toll for the trade fair as we knew it. All these people from all these different places, mingling together inside windowless sheds: what could possibly go wrong? There were postponements and cancellations, miniaturised editions and online platforms that sought to replicate the real events online. Maison&Objet was no exception – this March’s iteration is the first full-size in-person edition of the Paris-based fair since January 2020. As architect Franklin Azzi, winner of Maison&Objet’s premier prize, says: “I’ve been Designer of the Year for three years.”
This year’s winter edition was postponed from January to March, in the hope that travel restrictions would ease by spring. This turned out to be a canny decision: having visited the fair, Maison&Objet felt as international and teeming with life as it did just before the pandemic. A stroke of luck also saw it coincide with an extraordinary spring heatwave. The tiled esplanade of the Parc des Expositions de Villepinte, north of Paris, gained a holiday atmosphere, all crème glacée and sunglasses.
Parc des Expositions de Villepinte was bathed in sunshine for the return of Paris’ premier design fair.
An installation by the automaton-maker Atelier Michel Tallis lent the event the aspect of a fairground. It featured a band of anthropomorphic animal musicians enclosed within a glass dome, led by a pink-horned unicorn bedecked with flowers and feathers. Inside, things were toned down, but only a little. Rare times…, a trend exhibition by the design consultant François Delclaux, featured a ceramic goose by Quail Design and totem-pole like candles from Miho Unexpected Things. One darkened room hosted two of AP Collection’s eminently Instagrammable stuffed animal chairs.
There was more subtly in the Rising Talent section focused on emerging Japanese designers, each of whom had a stall. Some are immediately visually striking, such as Eindhoven-based Satomi Minoshima’s bags that resemble flayed human skin and Yuri Himuro’s vividly patterned textiles, which visitors can cut into. Perhaps the most fascinating, though, was Haruka Misawa’s paper-based work, displayed on tiered wooden platforms. Concealed devices make Misawa’s highly textured paper disks sway and move, as if upset by wind.
Japanese designers were the focus of the Rising Talent awards this year.
A separate display in the fair’s craft section was given over to ceramist Toru Kurokawa, whose works have a mathematical complexity that nevertheless emerges from the workings of the human hand. This focus on the handmade is subverted by Azzi, whose exhibition Retro Futur – discussed in this Disegno podcast for Maison&Objet – playfully danced between manual and digital craftsmanship. It is housed within a pavilion formed of off-white felt strips resembling vertical blinds: a simple idea, executed with elegance. You had to push them aside to enter the roofed space. Within, Azzi installed a screen-topped table covered with virtual catalogues, drawings and tools. These elements intermittently come alive, as if Azzi is invisibly working at the desk. In a fair so concerned with tactility and physical presence, it is interesting that Azzi uses digital technology to provide an illusion of it.
teamLAB, the international art collective best-known for their interactive screen-based installations, have gone the other way, producing an unusually touchable work. Resonating Microcosms — Solidified Light Colour consists of wobbly ovoid modules spread across a darkened room. Each emits coloured light and a sound tone. Push one, and its colour and sound tone spreads to others, as if carried by the wind. It is a fun idea, delivered with clarity. The reason for its presence here is not so obvious, unless to serve as a metaphor for design objects in the maison, resonating off each other.
Glowing haptic ovoids lit up an installation by teamLABs.
The number and variety of these pauses between exhibitors makes Maison&Objet a more congenial experience than many of its international brethren. This edition played particular attention to hospitality spaces. La Cuillere, a collaboration between designers Daniel Rozensztroch and Paola Navone, had chequerboard osteria clothes and a fridge of doilies. It centred around Rozensztroch’s extraordinary collection of spoons, some displayed in vitrine-come-tables and others replicated in a wallpaper scheme.
More cluttered was Bistrot Joe Sayegh, a “jumble of tribal statues and unique curiosities” whose adjoining showroom might lean uncomfortably close to Gauguinesuqe exotic fantasy for some. The most complete oasis, though, was Tristan Auer’s salon de thé. Modelled on a seaside resort, it had a striped service hut, beach umbrellas and a graceful reimagining of a lifeguard’s chair. A row of azure hangings imitated the summer sky. Some visitors seem to have been fully consumed by the dream of summer, drowsing on the sun loungers as the fair bustled on around them. Auer might have done his job too well.
Words Joe Lloyd
Images Maison&Objet