For its new exhibition, Hectare Gallery has invited six designers with diverse profiles, six gatherers, each in her own way. They explore, reinterpret and reshape materials, rewriting the history that inhabits them.
Through the work of Charlotte Van de Velde, Isabelle Azaïs, Julie Decubber, Juliette Même, Ognyana Teneva and Xinyi Chen, the thought of memory is requestioned. As well as its future. From letting go and transformation, of shedding, if not of alchemy.
Antique clasps arranged in contemporary bracelets; ceramic shards, charms and santons strung together: the idea of a collection becomes more playful and expands its definition. Iridescent surfaces merged into mutant creatures; dazzling jewelry emerging from almost nothing; threads drawn from bottles and woven into lace: the old is reinvented, between models of the past and structures of the future. Electronic components set with recycled and colored silver: the concept of the jewel, reimagined, enters a new era.
Six unique, meticulous and bold approaches, opening up new semantic fields and shifting the cursor on the axis of past/discarded – future/recomposed. A deliciously subtle dialogue develops between these multiple identities, sensitive to the unexpected.
Humour often seeps through in these creative adventures, which are nevertheless imbued with an awareness of an uncertain present. The works of the six artists brought together by Hectare under the title Matières cueillies are at times a mockery of prejudices and references to ‘value’, at other times an invitation to share stories made up of memories or utopian dreams, offering our senses an oeuvre of ennoblement where technical finesse is spiked with poetry, in pieces imbued with their multifaceted personalities, oscillating between extravagance, rigour and lightness.
