PAD Paris returns for its 28th edition to the Jardin des Tuileries, bringing together 77 international galleries in the fair’s trademark intimate format, where decorative arts, historic and contemporary design, pressed close together, enter into a conversation that enriches both. Until Sunday 12 April.
PAD is not a fair you rush through. The stands are dense, the choices deliberate. You keep stopping, going back, reconsidering. Something runs through this edition that feels almost like a collective instinct: animals everywhere, in ceramics, bronzes, furniture. Owls, hens, tortoise tables, creatures that seem to carry genuine emotion, as though each had wandered into the fair with a personality already formed. Against an era of abstraction and dematerialisation, the fair asserts that objects need presence, character, something close to a will of their own.
The jury, presided by interior architect Laura Gonzalez, awarded four prizes. Best Stand goes to Romain Morandi for a surrealist presentation where unique furniture and small editions dialogue in the spirit of André Breton, moving between the pioneers of the 1900s-1920s and the avant-garde of the 1980s-1990s. The Historic Design Prize goes to Laffanour/Galerie Downtown for L’Armoire aux Poissons, an extraordinary 1961 cabinet conceived by Le Corbusier and sculptor-cabinetmaker Joseph Savina, its pale wood contrasting with aquatic reliefs carved against the green drawers. The Contemporary Design Prize goes to Dumonteil Design for Aurélien Veyrat’s chest in brick marquetry on second-hand furniture, upcycling raised to the level of a genuine plastic language. And the Special Jury Prize goes to Maison Intègre, founded in Ouagadougou in 2017, whose fifteen craftsmen fashion furniture and objects in lost-wax bronze from recycled metals and natural materials, a practice of transmission and local knowledge enriched by collaborations with international designers.
Among the works that stopped one entirely: Time out of place by Yashaswini Puthanpurayil Chakkapoyyan. A draped form entirely covered in mosaic, bright yellow and anthracite, its surface following the folds and falls of fabric as though hard matter had learned softness. The piece was born from a meditative gesture: personal narratives traced in charcoal, covered in oil paint, then built up tessera by tessera through years of repetitive work. It took nearly three years to complete. In a market where speed of production is routinely mistaken for intensity of creation, this mosaic drape stands as a quiet, immovable counter-argument.
Florian Daguet-Bresson presents a selection of contemporary ceramics marked by colour, formal freedom and technical audacity, a reminder that rigour and delight are not opposites.
Élie Top, the Parisian jeweller who trained alongside Yves Saint Laurent and spent a decade creating for Lanvin before founding his own house in 2015, presents a selection drawn from across his career. Heraldic bracelets, snake and chameleon rings set with old mine cut diamonds, rubellites and emeralds: pieces that move between talisman and mechanical dream, between deep historical reference and something entirely his own. At PAD, where the line between jewellery and sculpture is productively blurred, they feel precisely at home.
PAD Paris, Jardin des Tuileries, entrance facing rue de Castiglione, Paris 1st. Until 12 April 2026.
