Delighted with this first artistic collaboration, the company receives this year the plastic artist Pierre Paulin. Artist residency in company. At the dawn of this second residency, back in light on a unique experience during which, employees and artist, exchange their looks and their know-how of "material transformers".
spectra, etc. - Sara Favriau © cneai
Art and worlds of work
The residencies of artists in companies are based on the charter "Art and worlds of work", developed by artists, entrepreneurs, and actors of cultural action. This charter promotes the presence of art in the workplace in all sectors of activity.
Philippe Normand, director of The French Compagnie du Bouton, discovered the program "Residency of artists in companies" thanks to Réseau Entreprendre 93. The Pantinian entrepreneur saw in this project the opportunity for his staff to "value in their own eyes their daily creation of a useful but "beautiful" object." At the initiative of the Visual Arts Department of DRAC Ile-de-France, a research and creation residency project has been set up. Associating the French Compagnie du Bouton, the cneai and the sculptor Sara Favriau, this residency "focused on encounter and exchange, open to new surprises and experiments" in the artist’s own words, gives a central place to exploration.
A white card "particularly relevant" according to the director of the company, "since in the absence of constraint or project, the artist, having found his inspiration in our profession, finally created a work directly inspired by our products." This approach allowed the employees of La Compagnie Française du Bouton to take a new look at their work, which has become a source of inspiration and subject for exhibition.
In contact with the precious and delicate materials used by the company to make buttons for luxury brands, a new approach to wood and sculpture was imposed on the artist. In his previous projects, as the repetition, in short, is not amused by its singular repetition, or covetousness, Sara Favriau had used unsophisticated and rudimentary wooden cleats to create structures that were both huge and weak, at the edge of decorative arts and minimalism, working mainly on the angle and little on the curve. In his solo exhibition Comma, or simply brigands at the Cneai in May 2018, the culmination of her company residency, Sara Favriau shows how she diverted the buttons from their utilitarian function and revisited her sculptress gestures on a micro-scale. From these creations are born small sculptures freely inspired by African statuary and gathered in a series entitled The Allied Age is Bronze. At the heart of the exhibition, amidst the statuettes, Sara Favriau imagined a modular sculpture named Nice manners, in which conglomerated and shaped buds seem to change into organic, almost expansive form.
good manners - Sara Favriau © cneai
At the end of this first residency, the director of La Compagnie Française du Bouton noted with pleasure that Sara Favriau’s sculpture activity had resonated with the craft activity of her company, both involving a "transformation of the material". The positive results he gained from this first residency encouraged him to renew the experience. Mixing fashion, sculpture and poetry, the artist Pierre Paulin settled in late 2018 at La Compagnie Française du Bouton.
Interview with Sara Favriau
Did you get along well with the Button Company employees?
Yes, we got along very well! It went well even if it was not obvious at first these buttons. I did not expect it, I discovered as and when materials and materials. Not just pimples, tips of horns, ebony, things in all directions in their reserves.
Did you meet nice people there?
Yes. These meetings are relatively simple because they are generally craftsmen, people with fairly direct contact. I was pleasantly surprised to discover a family business. Benevolent between them, and benevolent with the person they received, that is to say me.
What ideas did you have when you entered a company residency?
None. It was better not to have any. When you arrive with pre-established ideas, it is always more complicated. It was really beneficial not to have any.
Are these the subjects that have carried you in your work?
These are tests, shapes, things like that. Buttons are normally seen from the front. When you see a button on a jacket, you always see it from the front, never on the edge. I told myself that if I apprehended the front button, I would make the painter, which did not interest me much. So I decided to take it as a volume. I tried to make the sculptor out of it. There, at the Compagnie française du bouton, they mainly use plastic, polyester resins, wood, etc. So it wasn’t the materials that marked me first. But beyond that, they also have many other materials such as bone, horn, mother-of-pearl, etc. These are things that I discovered in a second time, by searching their stocks.
How did you work?
I was in their facility, in a production workshop with the machines, now laser and digital. But their turn was wood. I gave myself the machines they no longer used for the simple reason that, like that, I could work without soliciting them, without having to wait until they were done before they could do something!
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