MICHEL LEO GALLERIA FUORI SALONE 2010
MICHEL LEO FURNITURE IN PERGAMENA
April 14 – 20, 2010
Mostra "Vintage-Luxury & Art"
April 14 - May 15, 2010
GALLERIA MICHEL LEO
via Castelfidardo 2, angolo Via San Marco
20121 Milano
Cocktail party
April 15 Thursday, 2010
18.00 - 23.00
Opening hours
10.00 -19.00
THE ELEGANCE (AND THE STRENGTH) OF SIMPLICITY
When asked what a woman should do to be elegant, Coco Chanel replied that, before leaving the house, she should look at herself in the mirror and take off an item of her clothing. The same method used by poets who tell the world by subtraction, by taking away, drying up. Digging into the words to reach the essence, the bone structure of feeling to come to simplicity. Because simplicity is strength, it is elegance.
This is what moves Michel Leo, “20th century archaeologist” (he doesn’t like the word “antiquario” - antique dealer- “It sounds out-of-date”, he says) and his furniture collection presented for the first time in this event which doesn’t really belong to the so called “Fuori Salone” rather representing that side of Milan’s design week which is more hidden, less proclaimed, more refined.
This is the idea that gave birth to the furniture that bares Michel’s signature and which finally became its aesthetic through a careful and minute hand-crafting process: the image and the content.
Nowadays people tend to fill their homes with unnecessarily creative furniture which has to, at all costs, express a concept and say something that goes way beyond its primary function. Conviction is what pushed Michel Leo to move from being a researcher to designing and producing furniture, somehow following the footsteps of his “colleague” Giovanni Patrini.
“A bookshelf is meant to hold books as long as they sit straight and not crooked. A table is for eating on. A desk is for working.” What counts is that they can combine function and elegance, levity and quality, simplicity and detail. They must stimulate the desire to be kept and carried along for a lifetime, home after home, city after city without ever tiring. Without growing old after a few seasons, crushed by their own constructed eccentricity.
This is where the drive - almost a physical need, one could say- to create a collection of parchment covered furniture with a modernist flavour came from - low tables, consoles, dining-tables, desks that combine sheep skin –treated and laid rigorously by hand to allow the skin to maintain the animal’s mark, from pores to scars- with iron or wood, hand-worked bit by bit by the expert hands of artisans. Finally matched with essential floor and table lamps, which convey levity and elegance not only to the observer but also to the context in which they are set.
There’s no precise inspiration behind Michel Leo’s furniture. The unequivocal reference lies within an age, a style, a movement.
The inspiration from which it is born, from which it literally takes form, is its creator’s personal history, his over 30 years of work, of experience, of research. The story of someone who has pursued and tracked down the objects of our history in markets – whether it’s a bakelite car or Ico Parisi’s armchair- and that of who has handled objects (“enough to cover a football field”, he says) that have crossed ages, fashions, even wars, all the way to us, and has absorbed them. It’s the story of who, again, has seen projects by André Groult and Eric Bagge, the furniture of Frank Lloyd Wright, Mallet-Stevens, Le Corbusier and Jean Michel Frank as well as tables by Mackintosh, chairs by Koloman Moser, hat-stands by Gustave Serrurier-Bovy and has processed them, bringing them back to life today reinterpreted by his own taste, his own sensibility. By his human and professional history.
All of this is present in Michel Leo’s parchment furniture, but can’t be seen – it can be felt. Because, as a madeleine, it works as a time machine and appears to us as familiar, reassuring, “ours” despite being new and original. It’s the essence of what we have read, seen, desired, of what seduces our eyes today without having to dazzle or impress at all costs. Items that convey beauty (and quality) not only to the sight but also, and most importantly, to touch, because “furniture must speak to the sight and to the hands, it must be heard with the eyes and with the fingertips.”
Michel Leo chose to match, or rather blend, his furniture with a collection of objects gathered and selected during his life as a “modern archaeologist” . Approximately two-hundred items dated between 1920 and 1970- precious, unique, unobtainable. Objects that are, in some way, the furniture’s source, its matrix, its cultural and creative background: the elegance in the shapes, the essential forms, the craftsmanship in the making, the attention for detail which characterize parchment furniture derive from that, from this Vintage. A Vintage that finally leaves the tight field of second-hand dresses, handbags, and shoes to embrace an entire world made of objects, jewelry, ornaments, toys without which Leo’s creations wouldn’t exist.
Vintage: Luxury & Art is, in fact, the title of the exhibition which brings together shagreen (stingray skin) boxes, crocodile and turtle handbags (strictly forbidden nowadays), craquelés ceramics, Bugatti and Mercedes bakelite model cars, Lalique bracelets, ultra-flat Piaget watches with jade, onyx, coral, lapis lazuli dials (including an extremely rare one encased in a gold $20 coin dated 1879). And hats, quartz and amethyst brooches, 1920s Cartier alarm clocks, vases, and bronzes.. which blend harmonically with the consoles and the iron, wood and parchment tables on which they lean.
All because, as Michel himself underlines “beauty has no age, and when we recognize it, find it, possess it, we want it to accompany us through all our life. Because it’s a profound, intimate, and indispensable part of our existence and of ourselves. Yesterday like today, today like tomorrow.”
Contact
Michel Leo
348-5941575
Marco Leo
345-4411093
info@michelleo.it
www.michelleo.it
Daniela Vita Schirinzi
Ufficio Stampa
info@studioschirinzi.it
tel. +39 349 5858989
