Mario Ceroli 'Fratina' Chairs

Thonet armchair with a printed illustration. The seat and backrest are weaved in rattan. The rest of the frame is covered in a print that could have influenced by the great Fornase...

Collectible design / Functional art, Lionel Jadot for Everyday Gallery, Belgium 2020 Born in Brussels in 1969, Lionel Jadot is an interior designer, artist, designer, filmmaker, adventurer. But all at once, preferably. Lionel Jadot is firing on all cylinders. ‘I never throw anything, I pick up everything. Not having a green thumb, I’m trying cuttings, weddings against nature. I never forget a line.’ He’s inviting us in subtle, off-beat worlds, on the edge of reality. Its material is made of dilated time. A wandering spirit, he seeks a protective balance in a hostile world. It is his constant questioning: what happens to the place where we live? For Lionel Jadot, everything is object, everything is history. He draws from other places, other times, and seeks what’s linking them. He sews, stitches, unpicks, blends materials, combines eras. He will enshrine some wood essence in metal, some mineral in a plant, the old in the new. ‘I take extra care to the joint between two materials.’ With him, there is always some play in the parts, as in a piece of machinery. From a kingdom to another, he provokes organic, viral growths, generating energy. Linking past and future, he never forgets a line. ‘I accumulate them.’ He’s inviting us in subtle worlds, off-beat, on the edge of reality. Are we in 1930 or in 2030? Both, no doubt. Its material is made of dilated time. The eye goes hand in hand with the ear. ‘When I walk into a place, I listen to the good (or bad) it does to me. An ineffable feeling.’ He recreates mutant buildings, like the future Royal Botanique, a 5 stars hotel housed in the Church of the Gesu, a former convent behind a 1940 façade. He talks about a ‘hotel object’, which he holds and turns around in his hand. A wandering spirit, he’s flirting with retro-futurism. The Jam, another hotel, is intended for urban travelers, fans of swiftness, fluidity and hospitality. He designs interiors as a set of objects: a motorcycle cut in concrete becomes a bar counter. He finds gothic cartoon echoes, from the likes of Moebius, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Enki Bilal, sets from Garage Hermétique and Blade Runner, a protective balance in a hostile world. Discovering Jadot’s little cosmos of collected and accumulated goods, it becomes clear that every element has its own story. I tried to collect them and in turn, devour them in the coming paragraphs. But first: the show is best experienced seated, barring the distinction between object of use and object of attention, they invite for different types of conversation. The seats, chairs, thrones all make us think of our own physical comportment, and of how the seat lends grandeur to the person sitting on it, by crowning its presence. The crackling floor, the felt walls and the diffuse light slow you down into an oddly absorbing environment, in which you are left puzzled. In the eclectic collages of objects, bits and pieces collected all over the world come together in ways practical, and logical, though possibly only in the artist’s mind. All his finds eventually seem to fall into place. Starting with the mere conception of a chair, rather than with a set-out plan or sketch, the works are intuitively construed out of an archive that one can only imagine the dimensions of. Things forgotten by others, precious for him, were all once designed for their own purpose. Here they find their fit as a base, a closing system or a balancing element. The first piece that opens the exhibition, the most throne-like of all seats in the show, builds around a chair of his grandmother, protected by mops, and harassed with bed springs. As you enter the space, you pass by a shell leaning over a yellow seat that stems from his old Mustang, and find a white stool piece with Mexican leather dog training whips— the white building blocks of which turn out to be dried molding material, as found and broken out of a bucket by workers every morning. Further, the stone piece that reminds one of the stone age, is indeed made of 400 million old rocks, and the soft seats are lent from construction, where these strokes of textile carry up the heaviest goods. In the corner — but as you walk this walk please be seated on any of the thrones and experience the work for a moment— the green fluffy cover is made by XXXX who remakes cartographies of warzones, one of which is here mounted on a flexible fishing chair. On an experience level, the conversation chair enhances self-confidence, while putting you literally in a good spot with the person you’re conversing with. The lamp perfectly shows the playful Cadavre Exquis...

Gerard Van Den Berg; arm chair; Modern; Plain, usually slightly curved, and yet suggestive and unmistakable forms are typical of Gerard van den Berg. The Dutch designer consciously goes for simplicity and for this very reason shows his creative ability. Van den Berg, born in 1947, studied furniture building and design at a technical college. In the Seventies, he founded together with his brother the Montis upholstered furniture company. Thanks to his designs the young company soon attained international recognition. It´s success did not stop van den Berg´s leaving Montis in the early Nineties. Since then he has been a freelance designer. His work for leading international furniture companies...

Italian postmodern black and white lounge chair, a beautiful piece of furniture that seamlessly combines the timeless elegance of the 1970s design e...

The 'T-Shink' functional art throne chair is constructed of elements from wooden moulds which date back to the 1950s and originally used to make stainless steel sinks...

High back wooden wabi-wabi church, pray bench, modular back, Rustic, 1880's Rustic high back wooden church or pray bench from the 1880s. The backre...

A rare pair of iconic chairs by Mario Ceroli appearing into a famous painting by Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) "Mobili nella valle" from 1963.

Wooden chair designed by Mario Ceroli with handmade structure in untreated Russian pine wood, an essence that characterizes all Ceroli's creations. The seat is inspired by the name o...

Italian mid-century Wooden Throne in style of Ceroli, 1970s Throne entirely built in light wood. The square seat has two armrests with a sinuous shape. ...

Mario Botta, set of 4 "Seconda" Armchairs produced by Alias, Italy 1982. Structure with armrests in gray powder-coated steel, black seat in perforated steel sheet. Backrest made up...

Three seats sofa model “acqua e terra” From the "Mobili nella Valle" series Manufactured by Poltronova Italy, 1970s Pine wood

Three 'Seconda' chairs designed by the famous architect Mario Botta for the Italian firm Alias, model 602. All 4 are painted black both in the structure and in the seat, they bear ...