Design & The Wondrous: On The Nature Of Ornament
For its the second temporary exhibition, the Centre Pompidou X West Bund Museum features more than 100 pieces from the Centre Pompidou and contemporary Chinese designers.
‘Design & the Wondrous’ questions the topicality of ornamentation, its relationship with new digital logics of conception and design production. Rich in formal and technological experiments, the exhibition is on the edge of the imagination and the exploration of new object morphologies, whose innovative materials and techniques open up a future connected to nature and alive.
Under the sign of Franco-Chinese cultural dialogue, it also brings together and for the first time works from the Centre Pompidou with those of contemporary Chinese designers, some of which were produced especially for the exhibition.
The notion of ornament is at the crossroads of art and crafts and digital technologies, between tradition and modernity.
At the heart of the exhibition, design objects interact with photographs of plants and other artifacts, evoking 16th and 17th century cabinets of curiosities where natural, scientific and artistic objects interacted. The curators are Marie Ange Brayer, curator, head of the design and industrial prospective service and Olivier Zeitoun, curator, National Museum of Modern Art
Nature as an ornament
Chen Min, Hangzhou Stool (2013, bamboo)
The Art Nouveau/Jugendstil movements celebrated the use of natural forms and plant ornament. Nature itself became present in design as early as the mid-1980s, when Italian designer and theorist Andrea Branzi ushered in "neo-primitivism", creating pieces almost entirely made of unprocessed natural materials. In this perspective, many designers have reused natural materials to take advantage of their ornamental appearance, from the Hangzhou bamboo stool by Chen Min to the Enignum XV ash shelf by Joseph Walsh, which evolves between design, sculpture, crafts and industry, through the Fallen Tree bench by Benjamin Graindorge.
By 3D printing a living mushroom mycelium to produce a chair, Studio Klarenbeek & Dros also offers an alternative to plastics or other industrial materials and blurs the line between living forms and objects. The organic shapes of the GU chair designed by the MAD Architects studio constitute an explicit reference to the skeletal structure.
Fractals
Stalasso (experience of forming prismatic structures) by Neri Oxman, 2010. Acrylic, urethane and polyurethane (composite thermoplastic resins). Donation of the artist with the assistance of Prof. Craig Carter and the Museum of Science (Boston), 2011 Collection Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, Paris
© Neri Oxman. Photo © Philippe Migeat - Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI / Dist. RMN-GP
Nature remains an inexhaustible source of inspiration, capable of energising each vocabulary according to trends or necessities. Recognised as a "treasure" for ornamental designs, fractals are present all around us: seashells with intricate spiral patterns observed by the German biologist Ernst Haeckel in his famous Art Forms of Nature (1904), snowflakes, landscapes coastal, Romanesco cabbage...
At the junction between computer science and biology, Neri Oxman uses design principles inspired by these living processes through fractal prismatic structures to augment the relationship between built, natural and biological environments. A player in eco-design, David Trubridge assembles elements that form the ornamental structure of his kit objects. For Nendo, research into geometric shapes and emptiness gave rise to ornamental motifs. For all these experiments carried out between design and architecture, the ornament is derived from patterns found in nature, whether or not visible to the naked eye.
Arabesques
She’s Stone by Lin Fanglu 2020. Cotton fabric, cotton yarn, wood. 350 x 620 x 60 cm
Courtesy of the artist and Art+ Shanghai Gallery Photo © DR Photo © All Rights Reserved
Crisscrossing different territories and mixing nature and industry, the arabesque is an ornamental motif inspired by nature. It is found as much in Islamic art as in medieval art, in the Rococo style as well as in the intricate interweaving of Art Nouveau at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. These lines and curves inherited from vegetable tendrils or mathematical arabesques were, in the 1990s, the ornaments reproduced in the first experiments with panels cut by Objectile's computer-aided machines (Bernard Cache and Patrick Beaucé).
In the pieces exhibited here, the games of curves and counter-curves make all centrality disappear (Ron Arad), can bend into exuberant interlacings (Fernando and Humberto Campana) or develop in a movement of infinite expansion inspired by phenomena. growth of nature (François Azambourg). Finally, Chinese designer and artist Fanglu Lin pushes the boundaries of ornamental experiments through her textile practice in her installation She’s Stone, which entangles patterns in a dense and organic structure.
Ornament and digital
Lotus Stool by Tan Zhipeng (2016). Brass. 65 x 55 x 55 cm. Edition de 10 + 2 EA Editionof10+2AP. Courtesy Tan Zhipeng and Gallery ALL
From the 2000s, the use of digital technologies by a new generation of designers and their research into cutting-edge technologies gave ornamentation a new dimension. The first designers working on 3D printed objects, Patrick Jouin and François Brument, relied on the possibilities offered by these new technologies. In 2004, Jouin used CAD (Computer Aided Design) to print his Solid C2 Chair in SLA (Selective Laser Activation), layer by layer, without any assembly or molding. Inspired by long, curved and mixed stems of grass, the Solid C2 Chair was the first piece of furniture made by 3D printing.
A pioneer in the use of digital tools, British designer Ross Lovegrove uses the most cutting-edge technologies to design numerous pieces whose ornamental forms are inspired by the growth processes of living things. In a search for harmony between man and the digital advancement, Zhang Zhoujie uses three-dimensional modelling and digital technologies to create a series of faceted metal chairs. Dutch collective Demakersvan uses French furniture designs from the 17th and 18th centuries to make the Cinderella table and reveal a wonderful past through the use of digital data. Unlike industrial design, which results from a mechanical process that induces standardized production, digital design makes it possible to create unique objects, where ornamentation is at the crossroads of material and design.
Design and wonderful
Table Growth by Mathias Bengtsson (2016) 3D printing (titanium, Electron Beam Melting EBM®). 81 x 140 x 66 cm. Purchase thanks to the support of the law firm De Gaulle Fleurance & Associés and the Acquisition Group for Design of the Société des Amis du Centre Pompidou, 2016. Collection Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, Paris © Mathias Bengtsson. Photo © Audrey Laurans - Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI / Dist. RMN-GP
In the 1990s, an iconoclastic approach and conceptual design emerged in the wake of Droog Design and Marcel Wanders in the Netherlands, inverting “the ordinary course of things” in the field of design in a “wonder” way. Marcel Wanders revives the totalising dimension of the decorative by creating his Virtual Interiors, a series of films that resonates like a disturbing triumph of the decorative and the fancy: in these fictitious and imaginary places devoid of any human presence, the luxuriance of the patterns echoes the hyperbolic play of scales.
The marvelous here arises from the abundance of ornaments displayed in these interiors, conveying the "strangeness" of the objects. Between ornamental exuberance and the marvelous, Michael Hansmeyer and Benjamin Dillenburger refer to the Renaissance caves in Grotto II. In this room, nature and artifice blend together through rocks and grotesques to such an extent that the ornamentation has absorbed the geometric order of the architecture to merge into that of nature. In our deeply rationalised society, parametric design and 3D printing experimentation provide an opportunity to free the design language from the shackles of functionalism, to distance itself from the norm and from the déja vu and fait, and to integrate the irrational to driving or to develop hybridizations against nature, to explore how wonderful adornments can be out of the ordinary.
Cabinet of curiosities
Algae Lab by Studio Klarenbeek & Dros with Atelier Luma (2018). Bio-based materials (algae, sugar-based polymer). Atelier Luma / Luma Arles. Photo © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI / Dist. RMN-GP
In this “cabinet of curiosities”, design objects interact with photographs of plants and other artefacts, just like in 16th century European cabinets of curiosities, Mirabilia (objects of wonder) coexists with Naturalia and Scientifica (natural and scientists).
As the monsters of nature, confronted with imperfection, surprise with their deformations, an original creation, resulting from craftsmanship or design, is likely to produce an effect of "wonder" technique.
Other Chinese designers on display
The Design & The Wondrous exhibition runs until February 28, 2021 at Shanghai Centre Pompidou x West Bund Museum, Gallery 3.
