CELINE celebrates art in different forms from the art projects in-store, to the artist jewellery program, to the portrait images taken by Hedi Slimane and to the exceptional savoir-faire in the making of the bags.
From David Adamo’s wood works and his simple approach to the material to Lukas Geronimas’s attention to detail and his otherworldly sculptures, Selections explores CELINE Art project in both Paris and Milan stores.
David Adamo
Paris Francois 1er
A process of slow removal is central to Adamo’s sculpture. Objects from everyday life take on new forms, revealed by their remains: the fruit after it has been bitten, the balloon after the air has run out. These remnants are cast in various materials, including bronze, plaster, and aluminum. The same is true of Adamo’s wood works—the eventual forms have emerged through the reduction of material.
In 2011 Adamo exhibited in a medieval church, the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Bergamo, Italy. He was allowed to take an unused oak beam from the baroque renovation of the church. Since then, wood has been his material of predilection for conceiving an entire body of monumental sculptures—totem-like columns, a colossal canoe, among others.
The totem-like columns are truly great examples of this interplay of mass and absence, an important characteristic of his work. His approach to the material is simple, elegant, and industrious all in one. The sculpture, “Untitled, 2012″—a twisted column—has an additional sense of tension and movement while preserving its iconic appearance. As for the fully covered in roofing nails totem, “Untitled, 2016”, it’s a rare example in his work, the harsh material looking like a protective armor for the wood underneath.
Lukas Geronimas
MILAN SANTO SPIRITO
Lukas Geronimas employs painstaking attention to detail and the highest level of craft to create otherworldly sculptures that call into question preconceived notions of materiality and useful form. His work often contains found or gifted material that is obsessively reconditioned to become unrecognisable from its original state. It is through this alchemical process that his forms find meaning.
‘Gate posts’ are a custom modification to a pair of found Douglas fir blocks. The dimensions of the blocks were not altered, they were merely capped and inlayed with hand-polished aluminum. The custom modification is meant to charge the objects with humane energy. The space between the two ‘posts’ is considered a gateway – while pas¬sing through this space, a body is traversing a volume within which the artwork has a physical agency. So, when you walk between these two objects, you are passing through a contextually-charged space. What lies on either side is determined by the environment into which the artwork has been placed. It could be the same, or different.
Info courtesy of Celine