Trend or Travesty?

As this show is winding down as yet another mind bender to open up visitors to new ideas and venues, I would be remiss not to report on Maison & Objet’s own trend presentations, which do just that, sometimes to startling effect. But then that’s what getting your attention is all about.

Three presentations created by three different conceptualists are meant to open our minds to the future, to regenerate from loss of sensibility, to regain and bring back calm and tranquility to our hectic lives, to return sensuality to our deprived senses, and to shed nostalgia and weight of the past in exchange for the pleasure of lightness.

• Delight by Elisabeth Leriche directs us "to break the weight that surrounds us" with delicate, fragile and soothing objects .She expresses her goal with a presentation of all mostly white objects, many of them fragile porcelains to achieve "a diaphanous and ephemeral and ethereal world."
• Sense Fiction by Vincent Gregoire for Nelly Rodi commands us to search for "new energies” with the assist of the "soft technologies and sensitive to the touch materials to begin creating a world of harmony to explore the fabric of a better world."
• Body House by Francois Bernard is the one that got me. Highlighted by a symbol of a belly button, it aims to focus on "the beautiful and healthy body and its vital functions to become a fertile ground for creativity."

I don’t know about you but I have had my fill of belly buttons seen wandering the streets of Manhattan over the last few summers, usually accompanied by what’s popularly known as a "muffin top," translation: too much fat around the  middle. And I don ‘t find either the least bit inspirational.

The body has, it seems, of late, become a serious preoccupation for creators of exhibitions. It all started with "Bodies" several years, ago which traces every organ and every blood vessel we breathe by. At last look (not that I have kept track) it was still traveling around the world.

I found this new take by Vincent Gregoire somewhat unsettling when asked to consider its relevance to home decoration. For instance, I can’t imagine why anyone would want to sit in a wing chair covered in fabric depicting your lungs and your kidneys. I had an even harder time envisioning what would be an appropriate place in my living room for a 2 ft. plus phallus in brown resin, draped in chains, or the large molded vagina sitting right next to it. My coffee table? I don ‘t think so.

Displayed variably against a back drop of a skeleton, an eye, a pair of lips and a hand was a selection of dismembered organs. In viewing those, I couldn’t help a sense of the macabre and discomforting thoughts of cannibalism. 

If that’s a trend – and apparently, it is, count me out.