Belle de Jour
Akari Unfolded Collection For The Noguchi Museum
YMER & MALTA / Océane Delain
2018
A combination of an innovative material and an intelligent assembly, Belle de Jour achieves the perfect balance between a soft translucency and mechanical performance.
As with every piece from YMER&MALTA, the design process of Belle de Jour starts with an intention, an emotion. On a trip to Bonifacio, Corsica Valèrie saw a cliff that sparked her imagination. The image of this cliff, with its multiple stratum of rock, was the genesis for Valérie and Océane to develop the design for this piece, which emerged from a long process of prototyping.
The resin and linen composite material of the sheets was developed in the studio. Valérie Maltaverne chose to work with linen as a French reference for the bamboo used in the washi paper of the 50’s Akari series.
This piece was presented at The Noguchi Museum in New York.
Resin, Linen, Metal, LED
Floor lamp : H.180 x L.75 x D.55 cm
Numbered Edition
Belle de Jour is from the collection :
AKARI UNFOLDED for The Noguchi Museum
“The exhibition Akari Unfolded – a series of 26 light sculptures – came out of a 2016 visit to The Noguchi Museum during which Maltaverne decided to apply her model to Akari. The challenge was to see whether she might, treating Akari as the tradition, extend its fundamental alchemies—what Noguchi called the intrinsic qualities of craft whose products cannot be successfully falsified (as the many Akari knockoffs demonstrate)—into the future.”
Dakin Hart, Senior Curator, The Noguchi Museum
Other pieces of the collection :
AKARI UNFOLDED for The Noguchi Museum
Other collections
EIDOS XXI
Eidos XXI was designed by the Valérie Maltaverne and Benjamin Graindorge duo, in collaboration with «l’atelier de recherche et de creation» of the Mobilier national, like an inside landscape, a moving forest in the closed space of the office.
Each piece responds to the other through a skilful play of scales, proportions, techniques, materials or colors. To remain faithful to the DNA of the YMER&MALTA Studio, the creators added, as they are used to, all the wealth of ancestral know-how to the most cutting-edge technological innovation.
Praise of serenity, the works in this office ensemble are powerful and floating, as if suspended in space. They come together in a play of truth, allowing the imagination to wander gently for a richer creative process.
Generous in its dimensions, the elements do not embarrass themselves with unnecessary decoration—no drawers, just shelves—to avoid hiding and simply lay down the essentials.
Cloe Pitiot, Curator, Musée des Arts Decoratifs de Paris
AUBUSSON TAPESTRY : THE GREAT LADY
Given the quality and cohesion of the previous collections from Valérie Maltaverne, YMER&MALTA, the Cité Internationale de la Tapisserie commissioned a series of art furniture pieces where the historical techniques of this savoir-faire, inscribed on the UNESCO list of Intangible Cultural Heritage, were given an innovative momentum by exceptional design creations.
“YMER&MALTA not only mobilized and skillfully played with the intangible heritage of Aubusson tapestry: it enriched it ».
Bruno Ythier, Chief Curator, Cité Internationale de la Tapisserie
SLEEPING BEAUTY: MARQUETERY REVISITED
Sleeping Beauty : Marquetery revisited Collection brings a breath of fresh air and creativity to one of great traditions of French craftsmanship: marquetry. Numerous types of precious wood are cut and assembled in an original way, depicting landscapes, animated shapes, abstract or figurative motifs. The result is a surprisingly kinetic, contemporary vision of marquetry.
COMBINAISON
Combinaison is a collection that often works through juxtaposition, at times through confrontation, inversion and even hybridisation, but never through opposition. A series of combinations that speak of moments where methods (gilding and corten steel), materials (paper and metal) and manufacturing processes (Horology, granit machining and 3D printing) collide.
À FLEUR DE PEAU : LEATHER
À Fleur de Peau pays homage to a traditional and luxurious material. This collection freely explores the possibilities of leather, playing with feelings and contrasts, textures, colours, shapes, in both supple and stiff leathers.
Powerful and sensual leather sculptures fill the space, making it more open and freer.
MORNING MIST
Morning Mist, a collection developed with Benjamin Graindorge, essentially proposes new shapes and reflections on the theme of nature. Through this ode to nature, Morning Mist proposes an alteration of reality, or perhaps attempts to reveal the essence of the real.
MARBRE POIDS PLUME
Marbre Poids Plume expresses the inconceivable, creating light objects made from marble.
Marble is ultra-resistant and, as a result, was refined to the extreme. Airy, sensual, light, delicate, it loses none of its density. Marbre Poids Plume proposes stark lines that surprise and move us.
A new poetic reality emanates from the pieces.
ILLUSIONS
Illusions is comprised of four pieces – two coffee tables, a cabinet and a mirror – the subtlety of which is not necessarily visible at first glance. Illusions acts like a sensorial and cognitive stimulus in the way it plays with optics, materials and perspectives that propose a new reality to the spectator.
DÉCLINAISONS
À L’ORIGINE
These pieces designed exclusively with Cédric Ragot tell the story of the beginning of YMER& MALTA.
This collection was born from a vision where creative virtuosity dialogues with industrial design reality. À l’origine has a dreamlike, sensitive dimension that transcends the function of the object. Its purity and originality make it a strong, memorable collection bordering on contemporary art.