Alexandra de Cossette courtesy Galerie Kreo
Alexandra de Cossette courtesy Galerie Kreo
Stepping into the Galerie Kreo, you don’t know what you are looking at, you are slightly disoriented, but you are instantly under a spell. Somewhere in that space, you notice menacing, yet mesmerizing, ceramic heads of animals - dogs, a shark, an ape, a hippo - which seem out of place in this gallery. They seem to be screaming at you, to be threatening you and yet you want to touch their multicolored glazed heads. Around these creatures, it’s a world of ropes and knots and colorful balls the size of ping pong balls, laying on a table, on a chair, a bench. On a wall, a collection of colorful knots.
Dutch designer Hella Jongerius’ exhibition, Bead Tables and Angry Animals, is both an enchantment and a puzzle. The eloquent text written by Anna Colin is a first step in understanding what we are looking at. “Jongerius keeps on learning new skills and training; she is currently studying glazes for ceramics, a recurrent medium in her work, but one that she has started to work with more directly. She also regularly self-initiates projects that test new processes, combinations of materials and gestures, some of which lead to industrial spin-offs, and others to remarkable, reflective presentations.” For Jongerius, work is all about un-learning and re-learning, testing, failing, understanding how new materials engage with us.
Alexandra de Cossette courtesy Galerie Kreo
The Bead Tables, like a 2009 stunning Frog Table designed by Hella Jongerius, are meant to be functional objects, even if it would require a lot of creativity and imagination to use them in our daily life to share a meal with one’s family or friends. More precisely, explain Anna Colin, these creations are meant to start a conversation. “They are conversation pieces to be more specific,” she explains. “It is now a matter of listening to them and reading their postures as signals, just as the gardener knows what it means when a certain plant invades a certain area or a responsible human knows what to do when they see a turtle trapped in a discarded net.”
It is still very mysterious to any human, but the point is - just like Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapped objects to make us look at them with more intent - to pay attention, to look, to ask questions. The Galerie Kreo exhibition is a conversation between the viewer and the objects that are presented to them.
The designer believes that objects have “the ability to express the unspeakable.” For instance, her Angry Animals jugs were made during the pandemic. She explains that the animals emerged from her hands despite her and that the forms muted from friendly to angry looking. “Vociferous, yet silent, they too demand to be part of the conversation about where the planet is heading,” remarks Anna Colin.
Hella Jongerius considers herself a designer on a mission, as she recognizes that design is one of the most environmentally damaging industries. In her view, explains Anna Colin, design has a major responsibility in ensuring sound relationships between people and objects they surround themselves with daily. “Design mediates between humans and the world; that mediation ought to be virtuous rather than merely based on market demands and the illusion of novelty.”
This is precisely why visiting her show at Galerie Kreo is so important. These objects, at first disorienting, lead us to a conversation with them about the nature of our relationship to every object we surround ourselves with and to the Planet.
~Jean-Sébastien Stehli
Alexandra de Cossette courtesy Galerie Kreo
Hella Jongerius. Galerie Kreo. galeriekreo.com. Until July 26.
