MATTIA BONETTI

‘New Works’

8 October - 12 November 2022

New Pieces from the master of gesture, Mattia Bonetti the Paris-based designer Mattia Bonetti doesn’t create collections of work. Instead, he dreams up individual pieces which emerge fully-formed from his fantastical mind and onto the pages of his sketch book. From there, they are translated directly from free-hand drawing into a three-dimensional reality, with no loss of the original idea.

What does unite Bonetti’s work, however, is a highly evolved language that he has developed over four decades, and which is derived from the baroque and rococo decorative arts traditions of France and its surrealist legacy: it is fluid and feminine; light, sensual and sculptural. His use of materials leans to the luxurious; cast bronze, marble, Murano glass, gilt, rock crystal, gloriously dyed lambskin and rich velvet. Trained as a textile designer, Bonetti attributes the softness and hand-crafted nature of his work precisely to a lack of industrial design training, as well as his process of free-hand drawing.

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New designs conform to this practice of one piece at a time, completed to incredible standards of perfection. “It’s what keeps me going,” says Bonetti who works from a studio in the 11th arrondissement, overlooking a charming park. “If I had nothing left to say, I’d stop.”

The KYOTO Buffet is concertina’d like a coromandel screen, and finished in thickly-lacquered canvas sacking and applique’d imagery in slick black nickel. With the vibrant coral colour and uneven texture of the sacking playing against the industrial smoothness of the nickel, the surface is decorated with relief flowers and butterflies cast in bronze. The base of the TWIST Table Lamp twirls like an unruly, unravelling piece of string, or an elaborate scribble made on a pad. Cast in bronze, it is a gestural tour de force.