Philippe Malouin — Demonstration, Gridlock collection 2010 — NextLevel Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: March 19 → May 12, 2010

Demonstration embodies a unique personality and the fundamental values of this designer. The title of the exhibition refers to both the French and English meanings of the word.

Demonstration is the result of the quest to achieve the quasi-scientific balance of an aluminum structure in which the connectors serve as tension points and whose configuration is invariably made up of 45° or 90° angles. Demonstration insists on design free of any superfluous effects, whose only aesthetic value is revealed through a light metallic structure with great architectural potential.

Philippe Malouin continues in his approach of representing the object in the minimalist manner. Carefully assembled by hand, 5 000 aluminium tubes and 13 different tin connectors are carefully assembled provide a foundation for the functional elements "the Ollie lamp, the Alice lamp and the Rad & Dar tables”. He persists in maintaining the object’s role in space as well as its perspective “the Robin mobile” and demonstrates his own special affection for the renowned of minimal art : the Isa Wall Hanging.

Philippe Malouin takes over the gallery’s exhibition space with a personal scenography that he documents through elements that play a role in the creative process along with a video.

Text by Pierre Doze¹

Repetition, structure, indefinite growth.

The grid creates a sense of mathematical vertigo.

We, on the other hand, will offer the perspective of a feeling of drunkenness, while remaining aware of the creation of the work’s contextual identity and not distancing ourselves from the creator. Because Philippe Malouin is a self-confessed dunce about exact science. So, straight away, let’s be precise about the domain where we are brothers: part of the countless members of the large family for whom disciplines remain abstractions, to the world that continues its strained relationship with the vicious order of scholastic curses.

There’s nothing alcoholic then; algebra’s zero does not become confused with that of degrees.The degree is one of angles, the poem of the right angle, the isosceles’ song. The structure keeps its technical promises to the nearest millimetre; gestures are necessarily mastered, words restrained, the writing tense.
It stands impeccably; no DIY, no approximations.

The refusal of chatter — Malouin is preoccupied by the debauchery of that troublesome nonsense — and attentive to not being an embarrassing silence. Rigour, the clarity of constructions, the irresistible impetus of physical rules, when the resistance of materials no longer says anything except the admirable distribution of strength, all done without perceptible effort.

This game we’re playing awakes the temptation to share the Moderns’ lyricism that sang to the expression of a certain number who manage to join other domains. Responsibility and good measure then, along with a sensitive intelligence: their rigour no longer that of the antiseptic prison world, there are nuanced lessons to be drawn from certain of the Moderns’ passion. By avoiding the punitive dimension, a hi-tech vibration can cross the structure more subtly; it’s another Buckminster Fuller inheritance, this time a translation at a domestic level.
Because, quite reasonably, what is at stake in the physical nature of certain pieces does not always demand that much material.

The means go beyond the patterns if they remain understood only in the sense that they are simply material necessities. While the structure bears the load, lightness, transparency and expressions can find a space to breathe: they become pattern, light and thrown shadows, whether a lamp or not — and still carry the temptation of a larger construction, the foundation of a system.

So, six prototypes to discover then, or pretty much, in number like in projection; Something boundless to read also, other ideas of vertigo.

¹ Critic and professor