Modern Rêves
by
From 16 January to 15 February 2024, the Chamagne gallery is hosting the exhibition Modern Rêves, the first comprehensive look in Paris at the work of Elsa Foulon.
Before becoming a designer, Elsa Foulon spent her early life as a dealer specialising in twentieth-century decorative arts. The career path of this daughter of an antique dealer is not anecdotal: since childhood, she has honed a very personal taste and accumulated the forms of a century rich in creators.
Elsa Foulon has a sensitive memory of the history of the decorative arts: for a long time, she touched, hunted down and handled furniture and objects to understand how they were designed.
By the time she began to think about her own forms, writing in notebooks - because her work always goes through a long drawing phase - she had chosen her masters and approached them in her own non-academic way, breaking down barriers and associating freely. Her work reflects her fascination with the harmonious organic forms of Paavo Tynell and Jean Royère, the infinite possibilities of light explored by French master glass-maker Max Ingrand, and a certain functionalism, simplicity of line and manufacturing methods inherited from post-war designers.
At the pinnacle of her inspirations is Diego Giacometti. He began with plaster, she with ceramics. But whatever the medium, they are both sculptors and designers. In his furniture sculptures, Diego develops a naïve and poetic bestiary. Elsa creates lighting sculptures with symbolist shapes, inspired by nature like the shells in her Nautile, and surrealist themes like dreams.
‘Simplicity demands rigour,’ she says.
As is often the case with self-taught artists, Elsa Foulon leaves herself little time to rest. All the ideas in her notebooks will need a lot of time and work to come to fruition one day, so the kilns in her studio at the foot of the Butte Montmartre are working at full capacity.
Her studio is above all a place of experimentation, where projects don’t always come to fruition, but where she feels free to try and try again. The more she masters her subject, the more she seems to want to unlearn it, or to start again from the beginning, to rediscover the beauty of the ancestral gesture that appeals to her so much, and its temporality that runs counter to contemporary production methods. She loves the inconstancy of fire that makes each piece unique. And working with materials: immersing her thoughts in the clay through her hands, and bringing a sensitive touch to contemporary design.
She also has a taste for exploration: right from the start, she began working in large formats that seemed incompatible with her material, dreaming of airy matter, and, with great rigour and desire, inventing earthen luminaires of great lightness.
Modern Rêves is part of the shared history of François-Xavier Chamagne and Elsa Foulon, who met as flea market vendors in Saint-Ouen. For these two connoisseurs of twentieth-century design, the exhibition is a celebration of that heritage, and their dream of the modern world to come.
