Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec: Patience Pays Off

(adam štěch) The Bouroullec brothers prove their unquestioned and privileged status on the worldwide designer scene with their exhibition at the Kreo gallery. However, they do not demonstrate it on a monumental scale, but on a very sophisticated and intimate scale through patient work.

The Bouroullec brothers rank among the very few designer superstars who have managed to keep setting their quality standards very high. Their unmistakable, aesthetic visual style, which they develop in one direction, serves as an example of a contemporary, prudent approach to design. Unlike other designer stars, such as Arik Levy, Marcel Wanders, and Jaime Hayon, whose endless production of ideas often results in varying quality of workmanship and form, the Bouroullec brothers keep their heads clean, approaching every design with patience and care. Thus, the Paris-based designer duo produces much fewer objects compared to other designers of their class, causing everyone to look forward to their new designs.

The designers have prepared three new projects for the Kreo gallery: the Lianes suspension lights, the Conques wall lights, and the irregularly shaped Roches shelves. The three products form a cohesive whole reminiscent of an artificial interior landscape. The Lianes lights can be randomly suspended and extended. The designers achieved a compact visual and functional effect thanks to the leather surface, which creates a tight cover. Thus, all the components turn into a homogenous matter. Leather also guarantees a pleasant tactile quality for the object and a non-negligible and significantly aesthetic element. As for the minimalist Conques wall lights, the designers achieved the effect of a floating lighting object through an ingenious racking system mounted from the wall. The black Roches shelves form, thanks to their irregular shapes and sizes, an interior assemblage whose form is reminiscent of the architectural use of unfinished stones, e.g. on the facades of modernist houses. Their matted surfaces evoke soft velvet at the touch.

The precise production of Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec shows functional innovation without a greater concept in an unusually elaborate form and elegant shapes. The creative duo demonstrates in their latest collection, edited by the Kreo gallery in a limited series, that contemporary design can be only about beauty and craft in quotation marks.

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