Dear Shaded Viewers,
Paris is alive and well, terraces are crowded, museums and galleries are open and what a delight to visit Vincent Darré and have him take me through his newly launched furniture collection ‘Insomniac’ . The ideas for the various pieces of furniture or lighting came to him over sleepless nights, dreams and nightmares. Below are the words from the creator:
“We have, I think, two parallel lives.
The first one during the day, in the eyes of everyone, the second one, more mysterious, at night, made of dreams, nightmares and insomnia. From these moonlit dreams, unknown lands open up to us. Sometimes I return to wander in palaces whose corridors I know, outside the truth where unconscious invention borders on psychoanalysis populated by chimeras.
My obsessions spin in my head and haunt my sleepless nights. By clinging to these fantasies I have built a collection guided by automatic writing to re-transcribe this subconscious into the present and turn the dream into reality.
The Mirage floor lamp, an undulating plaster column whose asymmetrical curves are sheltered by a straw lampshade flying from its own soulful waves. Snakes slip into our subconscious, erotic symbols, they are transformed here into a seat, the Serpentine chair. Mythological in appearance, two bronze reptiles intertwine to welcome a nebulous passer-by in its studded leather straps. Four burnished bronze cobras intertwine to support a veined marble slab forming the Hedonist coffee table, an Alexandrian quartet where Justine could lose her mind.
A strange figure reminiscent of Easter Island or the Aztec pyramids, white plaster ghosts crouch on the floor to transform themselves into a Taboo library or blossom cactuses in their brains emptied of dark ideas.
Observed by the Narcissus mirror with its ying and yang profiles of golden wood that infinitely reflect their eyes pierced by a string, hanging like trophies from a key of dreams. An eternal golden circle rises into the sky carrying with it two white chalk horns of plenty, an illuminated aroma that forms a Vertigo chandelier.
On the floor, a mouse laughs at seeing herself so pretty, from her dark bronze form, she lights herself by candlelight. The fish tries to imitate her, almost choking on her candle, more used to water than fire. Its greenish scales, bronze with golden reflections, desperately call for its companion, the Ostrich, which has the best chiselling, protecting its amber egg with a grey-green feather. She loses her mind despite her incandescent flame. A black and white ceramic horse sticks its head out of the wall to illuminate our misty anxieties like a lantern in the twilight. The Pegasus sconce can fly away. The dream comes to an end and I am carried away in a frenzied rodeo on the blond wood Buffalo buffet trying for the last time not to fall I wake up astonished in my crumpled sheets.”
Vincent Darré
Galerie du Passage
Pierre Passebon
20-26 Galerie Véro-Dodat, 75001 Paris, FRANCE
