Pierre Charpin, avec le dessin

Designer, visual artist and set designer, Pierre Charpin was born in 1962 and lives and works in Paris and Ivry-Sur-Seine. Since the early 1990s, he has been focused on furniture and object design.
His training in visual arts at the Bourges School of Fine Arts in the early 1980s has strongly influenced his approach to design. His research on form, colour and the patterns applied to the object that is characteristic of his work takes form both through limited edition objects mostly by Galerie Kreo and through collaborations with world renowned companies such as Alessi, Arita 16/16, Danese, Cristallerie Saint Louis, Hay, Hermès, Ligne Roset, la Manufacture Nationale de Sèvres, Träffa Träffa, Tectona, The Wrong Shop.
Drawing is the base of his creative process. He devotes himself to design projects while asserting himself on his own with his art practice of drawing, therefore in line with his training. He was devoted several solo exhibitions as well as a monograph published by JRP Ringier in 2014.

If we take a closer look at the essential purity of Pierre Charpin’s objects, we notice something discreet, maybe fragile. This delicacy is characteristic of a presence that is signaling to us rather than imposing itself as a sign. This “poetic” line in his work is conveyed by drawing.

Because to Pierre Charpin, drawing has never been just a step in the production process of the object but a full practice that contributes to his unique signature on one hand but conveys on the other a more innate relationship to form. His body of work has therefore included for some years - along the sketches of objects, completed upon production “drawings of drawings”. Executed in large format, these do not pretend to any other realities than theirs. In series of four, three or sometimes alone, the drawings reflect – in line with his artistic - training the possibility of a direct and immediate approach to the world of forms. Because it is first through drawing that a world emerges, appears to us. Through the simple economy of its means - a pencil, a surface - and its desire to bring the form forth, drawing is a poetic power. Poiesis, in ancient Greek, tells of the creation of a world… by the power of the gods, by the hand of man.

Free from the constraints of production, without any other purpose than that imposed by their own momentum, the forms drawn by Pierre Charpin unfold in a free play. It is a search, a journey of hand and thought towards a form he has not seen yet but may have glimpsed. Through endless repetitions of the same gesture, chromatic variations on the same line or the same point, this tension becomes a visual power, an inner dynamism involving the viewer’s eye in the emergence of form. This is where intimate and solitary pleasure turns into a silent and discreet invitation. An invitation to read between the lines, and beyond the lines, before any shape occurs, the sheer show of appearance.

Alessandra Fanari, 2013