R&E Bouroullec: 17 Screens

At the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec combine traditional crafts with advanced technologies to create a set of interrelated units made of glass, aluminum, ceramics and textile mesh.

French designers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec have been working together for over 20 years now. Their interpretive approach to design channels the discussion away from notions of aesthetics or technology towards a more conceptual setting. Drawing primarily on organic phenomena, they produce furniture and design elements that converge in intricate formations, like a sophisticated second nature that undermines the commonplace hierarchies of objects and space through units that are essentially moveable.

Away from the succession of trends in the field, their project is based on an ongoing macro-sociological research of living environments – habitations and work spaces – as informed by societal relations. Bouroullec pieces often double as moveable partitions, which allow, while delimiting the space, for a new and more flexible spatial typology to emerge, as well as an intimacy in shared spaces.

An animated film by the Bouroullecs, Growing a Chair, documents the developmental stages of their Vegetal chair, also used at the entrance space of the museum’s new building. The process brings to mind tree branches as they shoot up and morphs into a series of structures, from a lattice to a basket-like weave and finally to a chair. Ronan Bouroullec, who draws and paints, thinks in line and drawing. Raised in Bretagne, on the shores of the Atlantic, he is accustomed to wide-open horizons, often returning there to observe natural shapes and formations – trees swaying, the spread of mildew on barks, plant joints, color gradations and lighting modifications.

It is in Bretagne, across the blue-green infinity of forestry and sea, that “17 Screens” was born. “17 Screens” was realized across a year of research and development, and combines traditional crafts with advanced technologies. Unlike most previous projects they conceived, “17 Screens” was developed independently of a pre-commissioned end-product, having been realized as a museum installation from the start. Aquarelle drawings were translated into a set of interrelated units made of glass, aluminum, ceramics and textile mesh, with surfaces creating an interplay of light and color corresponding to changing ambient conditions, like seemingly generic “partitions” that project an individual touch.

The exhibition is sponsored by Delek Motors Ltd., Importer and Distributor of BMW; Sidney Simchowitz and the Simchowitz Family; Mutina; and Glas Italia; and supported by the Institute français and the Embassy of France in Israel.