RARE CRAFTSMANSHIP FOR INTERIOR DESIGN
Sunday 27 March —
11:00
- 11:45
The Talks — Hall 7
Description
"L’intelligence de la main / Les Lauréats" Association
Intersecting views from three Liliane Bettencourt Prize winners for the intelligence of fine handicraft. Since time immemorial, the decorative arts and fine handicrafts have been inextricably linked, giving shape to interior designers’ and decorators’ ideas, or stimulating their imaginations with their creations. In 2022, more than ever, ceramicists, cabinetmakers, engravers, joiners or bronze makers will bring decorative settings into being and will take them to an ever-more-subtle level of refinement, not hesitating to sometimes mix manual traditions with new technologies…
Participants
Fanny BoucherRotogravure Printer
Steven LeprizéCabinetmaker
Nicolas PinonLacquerer – Decorator
Danièle GerkensJournalist
Fanny Boucher
Rotogravure Printer
A graduate of the Ecole Estienne in Paris, Fanny Boucher is a Master of the French art of rotogravure printing. She specializes in this 19th-century process, which has become extremely rare, combining silver-plate photography with copperplate engraving, offering exceptional prints for museums, galleries and art publishers. In the year 2000, she founded Atelier Hélio’g, which she opened up to photographers, painters and illustrators. These have included Willy Ronis, Zao Wouki, JR, Gérard Garouste, Jean-Michel Othoniel, and Annette Messager, among others. Fanny Boucher made sure that the Ministry of Culture as part of the Immaterial Cultural Heritage of France recognized rotogravure printing, since it had disappeared from the French cultural landscape in previous decades. She has been teaching on a regular basis at the INP (Institut National du Patrimoine) since 2005. In 2015, the Ministry of Culture awarded her the title of Master of Art. She participated in the Wonder Lab exhibition dedicated to French Masters of Art, organized by Heart&Crafts at the National Museum of Tokyo in Japan in 2017, then at the National Museum of China in Beijing in 2019. In 2020, she received the Liliane Bettencourt Prize for the intelligence of fine handcraft, in the “Exceptional Talents” category. With the support of the Bettencourt Foundation, she set out on a new development project designed to open up rotogravure printing to the design and interior design fields.
Steven Leprizé
Cabinetmaker
Steven Leprizé is a 35-year-old woodwork designer, manager, and founder of ARCA woodwork, trained at the Ecole Boulle, where he has been teaching since 2011. In 2009, he founded ARCA, a workshop renowned for its innovations with wood. Having grown up between his mother’s restaurant and his father’s Museum of Machine Science, work is his daily bread! The restoration of machine tools from the early 20th century taught him to use his hands and his brain very early on and pushed him to become an inventor himself. Infused with tradition and ultra-curious, he invented and developed materials (inflatable wood, new marquetry techniques, etc.), which he uses in his creations and for his clients. He has a 600 m² workshop near Paris, with a team of 10 people, where craftsmanship and design have no boundaries. He has been a woodwork instructor at the Ecole Boulle since 2011. His noted projects have included: a series of handbags in watered wood for Hermès, a Renault concept car in WooWood softwood, a piece in monumental woods for AW² with its thermolabile wood at several projects around the world, participation in scientific theses with the Ecole des Mines and ESPCI, applied to wood, and more…
Nicolas Pinon
Lacquerer – Decorator
After obtaining his diploma in cabinet making from the Ecole Boulle in 2001, he devoted himself to traditional and contemporary finishing techniques. During a conference, he discovers Japanese lacquer and begins to be fascinated by this exceptional technique known in Japan under the name of “urushi”. Nicolas Pinon decided to go to Barcelona in 2003, to the EPSAR (Escuela Profesional Superior de Arte y Restauración), to learn the techniques of this material. Upon his return to Paris, he joined the Brugier workshop, where for three years he perfected his restoration skills and made decorations for sites all over the world. To perfect his knowledge, he decided to go to Japan where, during his first trip in 2006, he met the great master lacquerer Nagatoshi Onishi, a former professor at the University of Fine Arts in Tokyo. During his numerous stays with this master as an apprentice, he learned the ancestral technique of kanshitsu, which has been using canvas, clay and lacquer for more than a thousand years to make the structure of statues for temples. In 2008, he became a freelance lacquerer and decorator and has collaborated on numerous projects, notably with Jacques Garcia and Joseph Karam. Since 2013, he devotes himself exclusively to Japanese lacquer and shares his activity between restoration and creation of jewelry or furniture. Today, while working on lacquer according to traditional techniques, he carries out research, using new technologies. He is currently working on flexible supports in 3D printing and laser engraving of lacquer.
Danièle Gerkens
Journalist
Editor-in-chief of ELLE Décoration, ELLE à table and Art & Décoration, Danièle Gerkens has a degree in Economics and in the History of Art and Religions. Born and raised in Africa, she has worked as a journalist for ELLE magazine after various experiences: copywriter at Publicis, consultant at UNESCO, cook at l'Arpège with Alain Passard... She is also the author of several books including "Zero Sugar", an investigation published by Les Arènes.