fallenTree
Morning Mist Collection
YMER&MALTA/ Benjamin Graindorge
2011
The fruit of a collaboration between Valérie Maltaverne, founder of the YMER&MALTA studio, and designer Benjamin Graindorge, the Fallen Tree bench explores the relationship between humans and nature. The concept of time is evoked in the fall of the tree. How many years until the tree reaches even the roots of the sky? How many hours to reduce it to planks? How many days before it isreborninanewform?Howlongawaitbeforesomeonecomes to sit upon it and meditate, ad infinitum, on the cycle of life?
Reacting to a society embroiled in speed mania, Valérie Maltaverne and Benjamin Graindorge stand up against the mad race for consumption and profit. They create at the speed of life, at the speed of humans and their environment. In the tradition of William Morris’s Arts and Crafts movement, they seek to com- bine technological innovation with expertise, nobility of materials with the poetry of technique. The oak for Fallen Tree was chosen in the forest, with care, and in good conscience, then taken to a carpenter, who shaped it artfully, in accordance with the best principles of his craft.
Resting horizontally on a slab of borosilicate glass, with transparent properties and three times stronger than traditional glass, from one end to the other the bench appears suspended between two lives. A natural life, symbolised by the oak branches free to dispose themselves in space, and the life of knowledge represented by the precise and delicate crafting of the seat. Assem- blage and contemplation are Benjamin Graindorge’s watchwords.
In Fallen Tree those goals have been achieved. YMER&MALTA and Graindorge have assembled before and after, the natural and the artificial. Here, in this highly engaged work,
the two designers demonstrate and explore the omnipotence of humans over their environment. They invite the user to con- template and celebrate the luxury of a nature still alive, a nature now so vulnerable in the face of passing time.
Cloé Pitiot, Curator, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris.
Text written for the book of the 10,000 Years of Luxury Exhibition, at the Louvre Abu-Dhabi and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris.
The fallenTree was exhibited at the Louvre Abu-Dhabi and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris as part of the 10,000 Years of Luxury exhibition. It has also been exhibited at the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire Louis Senlecq in l’Isle-Adam, the Musée Quadrilatère in Beauvais, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs de la Faïence et de la Mode in Marseille, the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Saint-Étienne, the Centre Pompidou Metz, West Bund in Shanghai and the Homo Faber Foundation in Venice.
Carved oak and borosilicate glass base
Finished in solid natural oak
L.110 x W.273 x H.120 cm
Limited edition of 12
Acquired by the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Musée de la Chasse et la Nature and the Fondation Albertine, cultural services of the French Embassy in New York on 5th Avenue.
fallenTree is from the collection :
MORNING MIST
Morning Mist, a collection developed with Benjamin Graindorge, essentially proposes new shapes and reflections on the theme of nature. Through this ode to nature, Morning Mist proposes an alteration of reality, or perhaps attempts to reveal the essence of the real.
Other pieces of the collection :
MORNING MIST
Other collections
EIDOS XXI
Eidos XXI was designed by the Valérie Maltaverne and Benjamin Graindorge duo, in collaboration with «l’atelier de recherche et de creation» of the Mobilier national, like an inside landscape, a moving forest in the closed space of the office.
Each piece responds to the other through a skilful play of scales, proportions, techniques, materials or colors. To remain faithful to the DNA of the YMER&MALTA Studio, the creators added, as they are used to, all the wealth of ancestral know-how to the most cutting-edge technological innovation.
Praise of serenity, the works in this office ensemble are powerful and floating, as if suspended in space. They come together in a play of truth, allowing the imagination to wander gently for a richer creative process.
Generous in its dimensions, the elements do not embarrass themselves with unnecessary decoration—no drawers, just shelves—to avoid hiding and simply lay down the essentials.
Cloe Pitiot, Curator, Musée des Arts Decoratifs de Paris
AUBUSSON TAPESTRY : THE GREAT LADY
Given the quality and cohesion of the previous collections from Valérie Maltaverne, YMER&MALTA, the Cité Internationale de la Tapisserie commissioned a series of art furniture pieces where the historical techniques of this savoir-faire, inscribed on the UNESCO list of Intangible Cultural Heritage, were given an innovative momentum by exceptional design creations.
“YMER&MALTA not only mobilized and skillfully played with the intangible heritage of Aubusson tapestry: it enriched it ».
Bruno Ythier, Chief Curator, Cité Internationale de la Tapisserie
AKARI UNFOLDED for The Noguchi Museum
“The exhibition Akari Unfolded – a series of 26 light sculptures – came out of a 2016 visit to The Noguchi Museum during which Maltaverne decided to apply her model to Akari. The challenge was to see whether she might, treating Akari as the tradition, extend its fundamental alchemies—what Noguchi called the intrinsic qualities of craft whose products cannot be successfully falsified (as the many Akari knockoffs demonstrate)—into the future.”
Dakin Hart, Senior Curator, The Noguchi Museum
SLEEPING BEAUTY: MARQUETERY REVISITED
Sleeping Beauty : Marquetery revisited Collection brings a breath of fresh air and creativity to one of great traditions of French craftsmanship: marquetry. Numerous types of precious wood are cut and assembled in an original way, depicting landscapes, animated shapes, abstract or figurative motifs. The result is a surprisingly kinetic, contemporary vision of marquetry.
COMBINAISON
Combinaison is a collection that often works through juxtaposition, at times through confrontation, inversion and even hybridisation, but never through opposition. A series of combinations that speak of moments where methods (gilding and corten steel), materials (paper and metal) and manufacturing processes (Horology, granit machining and 3D printing) collide.
À FLEUR DE PEAU : LEATHER
À Fleur de Peau pays homage to a traditional and luxurious material. This collection freely explores the possibilities of leather, playing with feelings and contrasts, textures, colours, shapes, in both supple and stiff leathers.
Powerful and sensual leather sculptures fill the space, making it more open and freer.
MARBRE POIDS PLUME
Marbre Poids Plume expresses the inconceivable, creating light objects made from marble.
Marble is ultra-resistant and, as a result, was refined to the extreme. Airy, sensual, light, delicate, it loses none of its density. Marbre Poids Plume proposes stark lines that surprise and move us.
A new poetic reality emanates from the pieces.
ILLUSIONS
Illusions is comprised of four pieces – two coffee tables, a cabinet and a mirror – the subtlety of which is not necessarily visible at first glance. Illusions acts like a sensorial and cognitive stimulus in the way it plays with optics, materials and perspectives that propose a new reality to the spectator.
À L’ORIGINE
These pieces designed exclusively with Cédric Ragot tell the story of the beginning of YMER& MALTA.
This collection was born from a vision where creative virtuosity dialogues with industrial design reality. À l’origine has a dreamlike, sensitive dimension that transcends the function of the object. Its purity and originality make it a strong, memorable collection bordering on contemporary art.
