An expert, collector and advocate, he has been a familiar face on the art scene for decades and boasts firm friendships. That with Yves Klein was the most crucial and he conserves iconic and very personal mementoes of him, such as his quasi-relic judo belt. In what seems almost a twist of fate, he remains close to Klein’s work which now secures big hammer prices on the second-hand market, on which Pierre Cornette is a conscientious and key player.

He and Daniel Moquay even wrote the foreword to a book written by a young Klein: a manual on Kodokan Judo, the master of the immaterial having been an expert practitioner but, perhaps, a less successful populariser of this martial art.

A key factor in the success of this new Matali Crasset adventure–project is the behind-the-scenes involvement of Stéphane Correard. The new director of the auction house’s contemporary art department has been far more than simply a prompter. The French critic and intellectual is a fan and dutiful promoter of the designer's forays into the contemporary world. A few years ago, when became curator of the Salon de Montrouge, it was to Matali Crasset that he entrusted the difficult task of its exhibition design. It is therefore no coincidence that their shared passion should come to fruition in a physical space – this stage of art and for art, designed for Cornette de Saint Cyr.

Crasset has treated it with distinction and irony: a generous backdrop for an environment that – in a mix of jest and gravity – interfaces with the system of “upping the ante” that inscribes the destiny of art in figures that end in a long line of zeros.