Their names are Wendy Andreu, Laureline Galliot, Adrien Garcia, Natasha&Sasha, Mathieu Peyroulet Ghilini, Julie Richoz, and they are the new talents selected by the jury of experts for the Rising Talents format, the one dedicated to emerging designers from the Parisian fair Maison&Objet 2020. It is difficult to frame their work under a common label.

Those intrigued by matter and its manipulation, those ready to make the presence of technology transversal, those inclined to imagine unforeseen uses for the legacies of tradition, these young designers seem rather to find the lowest common denominator in their desire to escape the opulent canons of a certain French-style luxury. Claiming improvisation and freedom of movement, playing on graphic imprinting and making projects without constraints of mandate, beyond the definitions of gender.

It is a bold and playful minimalism the one proposed by Adrien Garcia (selected by Pierre Yovanovitch), a designer who divides his time between Paris and a Breton castle where, taking advantage of a highly scenic space, he is inspired by off-scale solutions, far away – but you never know – from the small size of the capital’s apartments. His integrated block of concealed wooden tables, chairs and consoles claims the taste for an uncompromising solution, which opposes the seduction of an eclecticism made up of small combinations.

The work of Laureline Galliot (selected by René-Jacques Mayer, director of the Camondo school) has a pictorial matrix, which finds in the free use of colour a way to claim a fluid décor, both in form and function. An example of this is the Jug jug, whose unclassifiable morphology – 3D printed – alternates seamlessly edges and curves, fluorescent colours and dull tones. Tufty, a rug made in collaboration with Nodus, betrays the instinctiveness of the original design from which it was created, made with the fingers on the screen of an iPad.

Mathieu Peyroulet Ghilini, instead, looks at a mise en espace; this talent was selected by Pierre Charpin. His piece Marie Laure en Amerique, developed during a residence in Sèvres, has the courage to imagine a truly unprecedented application of porcelain, outlining a type of object that is difficult to define (installation? tapestry sui generis? room divider?) that balances between rope and ceramic modules an exercises halfway between architecture and decoration.

In between designers and makers, the Natasha & Sacha duo (Natacha Poutoux and Sacha Hourcade, selected by Françoise Seince, director of Ateliers de Paris) instead finds fertile ground for research in an attempt to hybridise the most classic domestic objects with technology. An example of this is their fascination with heating techniques, which leads them to imagine new heating objects – such as the Traces carpet – that allow energy saving sixteen times more than traditional room heating. Sustainability is also at the heart of METIS02, a humidifier for the home that renounces to plastic in favour of glass; METIS01, on the other hand, camouflages the appearance of a server thanks to hard disks that can be removed from a sculptural – and not better identified – connected furnishing accessory made of ceramic.

Already discovered for FAR 2019 at Nilufar Depot, the young Wendy Andreu (selected by Guillaume Houzé, director of the Lafayette Anticipations Foundation), a collaborator of Faye Toogood and Rick Owens, experiments with materials without looking for accommodating forms, but aiming for a result that is sometimes totemic, sometimes hands-on, the result of a process rather than a defined object. If in fact the pouf of the Regen series – presented at the fair with an integrated carpet – uses a waterproof fabric in cotton, silicone and polyester to outline yet another “shapeless-shape”, the brushed aluminium bookcase of the FAT series (in collaboration with Bram Vanderbeke) resembles a contemporary ziggurat that is admired for its iconicity and protagonism.

A thinner line, purged of the need to amaze, was opted by the designer Julie Richoz (selected by Didier Krzentowski, co-founder of Galerie Kreo), who is working on numerous collaborations with, among others, Alessi, Tectona, Louise Poulsen. Her vase from the Oreilles series is the combination of two layers of glass that play with proportions and the effects of opacity and transparency. Same simplicity only apparent for the Dyade pendant lamp, produced for Galerie Kreo, where a luminous ring animates the space thanks to the movements of a reflector that, also suspended, directs the light around it.

In addition to the Rising Talents, another opening on the freshness of the younger generations comes from designer Ramy Fischler with his installation “Design, ça tourne!” in the Trends area. By questioning certainties and fixed points, Fischler sets up 9 co-living rooms stimulated by questions about living highlighted on the walls of the installation. A way, once again, to underline the perspective of those Millennials who prefer questions to monolithic certainties, openness, even if destabilizing, to closed and all too predictable paths.