Image
 

145
Jean-Baptiste Fastrez 'SPACE CRAFT'

March 01 - April 15, 2024

Galerie kreo
31, rue Dauphine
75006 – Paris
Jean-Baptiste Fastrez - Jean-Baptiste Fastrez 'SPACE CRAFT'

For his first solo exhibition at Galerie kreo, Paris, Jean-Baptiste Fastrez (*1984) presents Space Craft, an ensemble of mirrors, tables and side tables, stools, a console table, and a sideboard. Characteristic of his research into the narrative power of objects and materials, this new collection features highly designed pieces with a techno-futurist aesthetic, made using both traditional and innovative know-how, such as straw marquetry and Nextel paint. Not a clash of temporalities, but rather a strong desire to reconcile them by creating furniture that directly reflects the current era.

What if the finest craftsmen of yesteryear had created the furniture of the future? What if Jean-Michel Frank, the iconic Art Deco designer, had boarded Space X? What if the 1960s interiors à la Courrèges had populated Gattaca … These are the kinds of mental and visual brilliance that Jean-Baptiste Fastrez’s 2024 Space Craft collection is sure to inspire. By orchestrating encounters, even short-circuits, between exceptional craftsmanship, a formal technological vocabulary, and a futuristic imagination, these new pieces play with our visual landmarks and established temporalities. Such collisions are heralded by the provocative association of the title, which juxtaposes “space” and “craft” in a manifesto phrase that sounds like the name of a mission: to create furniture in tune with our (postmodern) epoch.

Since his beginnings at the dawn of the 2010s, Fastrez has been keen to “get people thinking about the production of objects through the force of narrative.” In 2019, Vivarium, his previous collection for Galerie kreo, featured mirrors and furniture metamorphosed into wild animal silhouettes in a trompe-l’œil style, forming a universe of disquieting familiarity.

For Space Craft, he has created highly designed, very ergonomic pieces with a strong narrative dimension. The recurrence of round and lunar shapes, the grid motif inspired by the geometry of solar panels, the dynamic profiling of a console, the organic surface of a side table that evokes the materiality of a crater or the primordial thickness of a galaxy, the astronomical nods in titles such as Comet Console, Gemini Stool, Booster Side Table or Solar Mirror: all these aspects express his desire to offer a contemporary reformulation of the spatial imagination. Fastrez’s aim is to combine this universally evocative universe with heritage skills and precision craftsmanship—cabinetmaking, glass chasing, glass bush-hammering, straw marquetry—to design pieces that reflect the aesthetics of our time and its seemingly contradictory desires: on the one hand, a return to the essentials and the longing for the long term; on the other, the relaunch of the conquest of space and the reign of innovation. For the designer, an object such as the solar panel embodies this paradox. “Equally at home on a space station or on the roof of an eco-village,” he expounds, “the solar panel symbolizes growth and decline, acceleration and slowing down. I stage its presence as a simple motif that, even if it no longer produces electricity, provokes reflection on the contemporary.”

With Space Craft, Fastrez updates the visual and formal research inherent to the vision of space in the 1960s and 1970s—when the extraterrestrial horizon chimed with the reign of plastic and consumer society. “Today, with the Mars project and space tourism, we’ve entered a new space age,” he explains. “If the rockets are back, they’re taking off from a planet that’s not the same at all.” Since the times have changed, how can one create a language that reflects our aspirations and imagination?

A glass and lacquered metal table set in the gallery like a spaceship ready for a mission. Velvet-wrapped mirrors evoking the padded interior of a spacecraft with its portholes. Hand-crafted coffee tables in engraved and nickel-plated brass, opening onto infinite space. Straw marquetry looking like printed circuits on a UFO-style sideboard. The use of a non-reflective Nextel paint coating identical to that covering the inside of a telescope. A mirror with articulated panels that recalls both a roof of solar panels and the Gothic motif of a stained-glass window—a short-circuit representative of Space Craft. But all these references, all these details, do not impose themselves, and this is the great openness of the collection designed by Fastrez. His pieces are not saturated with signs nor affects. If they are an invitation to (space) travel, it is in elegance and proportion, a balance between innovation and tradition, the power of their obviousness and the singularity of their presence.

Clément Dirié

Exhibition Images

Available Works

Apollo mirror - Jean-Baptiste Fastrez - Jean-Baptiste Fastrez 'SPACE CRAFT'.

Jean-Baptiste Fastrez

Apollo mirror - Jean-Baptiste Fastrez - Jean-Baptiste Fastrez 'SPACE CRAFT'.

Jean-Baptiste Fastrez

Booster side table - Jean-Baptiste Fastrez - Jean-Baptiste Fastrez 'SPACE CRAFT'.

Jean-Baptiste Fastrez

Comet console - Jean-Baptiste Fastrez - Jean-Baptiste Fastrez 'SPACE CRAFT'.

Jean-Baptiste Fastrez

Comet round coffee table - Jean-Baptiste Fastrez - Jean-Baptiste Fastrez 'SPACE CRAFT'.

Jean-Baptiste Fastrez

Comet round coffee table - Jean-Baptiste Fastrez - Jean-Baptiste Fastrez 'SPACE CRAFT'.

Jean-Baptiste Fastrez

Gemini stool - Jean-Baptiste Fastrez - Jean-Baptiste Fastrez 'SPACE CRAFT'.

Jean-Baptiste Fastrez

Gemini stool - Jean-Baptiste Fastrez - Jean-Baptiste Fastrez 'SPACE CRAFT'.

Jean-Baptiste Fastrez

Gemini stool - Jean-Baptiste Fastrez - Jean-Baptiste Fastrez 'SPACE CRAFT'.

Jean-Baptiste Fastrez

Mercury mirror - Jean-Baptiste Fastrez - Jean-Baptiste Fastrez 'SPACE CRAFT'.

Jean-Baptiste Fastrez

Mercury mirror - Jean-Baptiste Fastrez - Jean-Baptiste Fastrez 'SPACE CRAFT'.

Jean-Baptiste Fastrez

Planet mirror - Jean-Baptiste Fastrez - Jean-Baptiste Fastrez 'SPACE CRAFT'.

Jean-Baptiste Fastrez

Solar mirror - Jean-Baptiste Fastrez - Jean-Baptiste Fastrez 'SPACE CRAFT'.

Jean-Baptiste Fastrez

Solar mirror - Jean-Baptiste Fastrez - Jean-Baptiste Fastrez 'SPACE CRAFT'.

Jean-Baptiste Fastrez

Solar storage - Jean-Baptiste Fastrez - Jean-Baptiste Fastrez 'SPACE CRAFT'.

Jean-Baptiste Fastrez

Starblade table - Jean-Baptiste Fastrez - Jean-Baptiste Fastrez 'SPACE CRAFT'.

Jean-Baptiste Fastrez

 - Jean-Baptiste Fastrez - .

Jean-Baptiste Fastrez is a french designer, born in 1984.
In 2010, he graduated from ENSCI / Les Ateliers de Paris with honors.
After collaborating for three years with Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, the designer opens his own studio in 2011 where he focuses on different product and space projects in limited editions and industrial design.
Fastrez has been designing for different brands and his notable collaborations are with the Danish textile manufacturer Kvadrat, the Galeries Lafayette in Paris, Sèvres / Cité de la céramique, the glass research center Cirva in Marseille, the French brand Moustache and the Paris and London based design gallery Galerie kreo...

Image