ABOUT
The aesthetic vocabulary of Marine Breynaert’s luminary art is comprised of raw lines, industrial history and precious materials. She combines gold, steel and riveting metal pieces to create demanding light compositions that borrow from architecture, industrial design, constructivism and a revival of art deco. She was trained at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (National School of Superior Decorative Arts) in Paris and has worked in textiles (Pierre Frey, Nobilis) and fashion (Heimstone). Marine Breynaert has combined her various heritages and original, empowering style to create her extraordinary and stunning collections. Her luminescent art works are pure visual paradoxes between our industrial heritage and a sense of contemporary poetry.
THE WORKSHOP
It is in the industrial maintenance plant of her grandfather, an engine repairer in the Landes, that she physically enters the contact of machining and industrial parts. She went to Bordeaux for 6 months between two positions, she will stay there for 7 years.
"I recovered the defective parts which left for the bucket: ball bearings,
gears… Looking over the shoulders of the workers, I learned to turn, to mill, to weld.
Quite naturally, I assembled the shapes and thus made my first totems. "
Each element is an enigma, which becomes an apprenticeship. Discovering a shiny bronze under the paint of an engine enchants the designer. Soon she classifies the recovered pieces to compose a panel of shapes, and brings in light: these are the first lamps.
On a steel base or a ball bearing which she will have brought out the light gray, Marine comes to stack a brass ring, then a lampshade whose metal unfolds in lace.
KNOW HOW
Over the years, the designs have incorporated complex and precious materials: Carrara marble, ceramic, oxidized wood, glass have been added to the upcycled shapes. Each material requires distinct know-how. The studio works in collaboration with an art bronzier at the Orfèvrerie de Saint-Denis, a gilder in Paris, a turner-miller and a ceramist in Normandy, a wood turner in Bordeaux. The final object is always a crossroads of workshops.
Assembly and finishing are carried out in a workshop in Fontainebleau.
Behind this mastery of know-how, Marine Breynaert likes to work on the finishes herself and leave room for workshop hazards that will never be visible to the naked eye. The good find, the accident of a material or a color which does not escape the rule, are always the place of a new interrogation, and a renewed creativity.
INSPIRATION
"Imagination is the sum of two memories"
Gaston Bachelard
There is a lot of memory in the objects of Marine Breynaert. The ashtrays and table lamps recall the world of his childhood, his father's cigar, the fire in the fireplace and the cozy atmosphere of the tables of friends. Ribbed glass lamps, standing ashtrays and brass discs summon Josephine Baker, Luxor and 1930s art deco brasseries, always with subtle touches rather than decor. The memory of the machine shop and industrial parts remains present in certain lines (Six Pans lamps, expanded metal, etc.) but is completely forgotten in the patinated bronze of a vase or the blue granite of a candle base. The inspiration of the studio and the designer is found in these precious materials, vintage without being datable, of which she assumes ancestral know-how while claiming entirely contemporary lines.
The lighting and decorative arts of MB claim the rarity of the past: the time when there were few objects, made by hand, and which lasted a lifetime. The timelessness of the lines allows this long time: the objects follow no fashion, no genre. There are no annual collections at Marine Breynaert: only the time of a good find, the nobility of the materials and the complexity of their way.
