Anima

15.09.2016 → 15.01.2017
Vue de l'exposition Anima
Carte blanche to Constance Guisset

Offer­ing Constance Guis­set the ground floor spaces of the mudac and the oppor­tun­ity to devise a cata­logue based on her creat­ive work has parked fant­astic enthu­si­asm and commit­ment from the designer. This young Parisian is an obvi­ous choice, given how much the qual­ity of her work, the finesse, poetry and accur­acy of her atten­tion to the world of object­saround us, has captured our insti­tu­tion’s atten­tion over several years. Valu­able conver­sa­tions have led to fruit­ful, intense exchanges. Constance Guis­set has rapidly made the char­ac­ter and unique­ness of our exhib­i­tion spaces her own, return­ing them back to their first historic func­tion: a private home.
Two apart­ments with identical furniture echo each other; the first in black and white tones and the other entirely in colour. This work through oppos­i­tions, through tandems, is one of the main qual­it­ies of her approach, open­ing out onto vast fields of invest­ig­a­tions. This ideas and research labor­at­ory is held in our museum’s spaces as an ideal­ised testi­mony apart­ment. The cent­ral island this play of mirrored furniture creates is surroun­ded by peri­pheral vari­ations of breath­ing space and explor­at­ory zones.
In her conver­ted space, Constance Guis­set invites us to sit down and discover novel perspect­ives, unex­pec­ted view­points on the urban land­scape of Lausanne. She encour­ages us to imagine exper­i­mental figures, to notice hidden or contrast­ing light. In coun­ter­point, private spaces bear witness to her constant research into the prop­er­ties of a given mater­ial, its express­ive power, manoeuv­rab­il­ity and func­tional poten­tial.
While the exhib­i­tion is an inten­ded ode to colour, it should be recalled that in the Middle Age colour was considered as casing, as disguise – the Latin word color comes from celare, to hide. The exhib­i­tion, conceived as a two-part parti­tion blurs lines and high­lights the great express­ive poten­tial of the hot / cold contrast. The visitor arrives into a setting of cold, neut­ral objects to then find them­selves encoun­ter­ing them again, bathed in colour. To dress objects in colour is to give them mater­i­al­ity, sensu­al­ity, the sensa­tion of a coloured effect which, taken in by the eye and retrans­mit­ted by the brain, invokes intense emotions. Colours drive codes and spark many reac­tions which influ­ence our envir­on­ment and beha­viour.
They affect our senses, and enrich the world and our percep­tion of it. In the arrange­ment she has conceived of, Constance Guis­set takes a dual outlook on the furniture. While in her research and her proto­types she explores neut­ral colours to bring out the formal char­ac­ter­ist­ics of her objects, she explores the poten­tial of colour in the layout and staging of the same series of products.
This creation of pairs also puts pres­sure on the notion of ender­isa­tion in contem­por­ary design. Is it possible to speak about a mascu­line envir­on­ment with cold shades? About a more femin­ine world with warm hues? Or, in making as much a direct as demon­strat­ive contrast, does Constance Guis­set look to burst these preju­dices, to go beyond these conven­tions?
Subtle and mischiev­ous, the designer has many surprises in store for us, with objects slid into recesses and the parti­tions built into her apart­ment. A treas­ure hunt, a play­ful and exper­i­mental itin­er­ary unveils the rich palette of a series of more personal products.
Constance Guis­set likes to foster visual meet­ings, to make her objects coex­ist in struc­tured sceno­graph­ies where rigour, exactitude and symmetry depend on a gloss­ary of sensual forms borrowed from the animal and plant world, from the obser­va­tion of the phys­ical laws of move­ment or from the Japan­ese art whose fascin­at­ing minim­al­ism she admires.
The designer welcomes us into her private realm, her show apart­ment, where furniture, objects, mater­ial, colours and propor­tions are many mani­festoes of her insa­ti­able curi­os­ity, her taste for the preci­sion of names and words, as well as the magni­fi­cent, taut equi­lib­rium of her creations.

Vue de l'exposition Anima
Vue de l'exposition Anima
Vue de l'exposition Anima
Vue de l'exposition Anima
Vue de l'exposition Anima
Vue de l'exposition Anima
Vue de l'exposition Anima
Vue de l'exposition Anima
Vue de l'exposition Anima
Vue de l'exposition Anima
Vue de l'exposition Anima