White Paper by - English Issue 9

This time around there is no letter.Instead, we bring the terms we use as our foundation to make this magazine; words that we have chosen and their meaning according to Merriam Webster’s dictionary. TENDERNESS: Feeling of gentleness and affection. CREATIVITY: The ability to create new ideas or concepts. NAÏVETÉ: Attitude of those who think or act with sincerity and good intentions. SWEETNESS: Affability, kindness, docility. INTELLIGENCE: Capacity to understand or comprehend, to solve problems. KINDNESS: Quality of one who treats others with interest and complaisance. NICENESS: Natural inclination towards the common good. RESPONSIBILITY: To recognize and respond to one’s own concerns and those of others. SOLIDARITY: Human value that consists of helping another person in a disinterested way, without expecting anything in return and without any personal benefits involved. INNOCENCE:…

He describes himself as a workaholic and one only has to take a look at his work over the last decades, or at his inspiring Instagram account (@marcoguerranyc), to ratify his self-confessed addiction to work. Marco Guerra (Chile, 1965) speaks with the composure of someone who has lived many lives, turning each answer into a lesson of profession and commitment. The photographer who learned from Warhol and Avedon, who lived through the explosion of the fashion industry in New York in the eighties and who later decided that abstraction was the most transparent way to communicate, now lives away from the madding crowd in Marrakech. There, focused full-time on continuing to swell his prestigious oeuvre and on the no less illustrious task of enjoying his ten-year-old son, he admits that…

How did you two meet and why decide to open a gallery specialized in Design? We met about 30 years ago. Didier at the time was working for his family business in sportswear, and I was working for the Organisation Committee of the Albertville Olympic Games. Didier had a passion for French and Italian mid-century design, and we began wanting to work with living designers, to promote contemporary creation. We opened a design agency where we began collaborating with a number of the designers we still work with today, and at some point, we decided to expand the nature of the projects we worked on. We wanted to create a space where the designers could create totally freely, without constraints. This was in 1999, when the gallery was born. As…

Laure Prouvost, French for her origins (Lille, France 1978), British for the artistic training she received at Goldsmiths and St. Martins and residing in Antwerp, is one of the best-known artists of her generation. Winner of the Turner Prize in 2013, and representing France at the last Venice Biennale in 2019, among other interventions, she is known throughout the art world for her sumptuous films and immersive installations in which she shows stories full of surreal humor in order to offer other fun ways to see the world. Her practice explores an expanded network of elements, including found objects, painting, sound or sculpture, all wrapped in intensely performative layers that result in immersive multisensory spaces. Summoning a familiar world, Prouvost takes a surreal approach to transform it into a fantasy…

Experience is the best teacher. This saying is truly a match made in heaven for someone as methodical and erudite as Olivier Saillard, and there is no doubt that a quarter of a century as a curator and fashion promoter is more than enough reason to endorse his discourse. For decades, the man to whom Azzedine Alaïa entrusted the preservation of his legacy (and who invented the profession of fashion curating) in a posthumously revealed writing has taken on the current times with the skepticism of someone who has seen it all. On the occasion of the opening of the exhibition “Alaïa avant Alaïa”, dedicated to the designer’s earliest and most silent period, we dive into two identities as brilliant as they are complementary. God raises them and they come…

In the early 1980s, Yves Saint Laurent became the first fashion designer to star in a major retrospective at a museum: the Metropolitan in New York. Forty years and a foundation later, his legacy returns to the official circuit of artistic dissemination with “Yves Saint Laurent Aux Musées”, which will take him to half a dozen Parisian museums. Aurélie Samuel, director of the Pierre Bergé - Yves Saint Laurent Foundation and associate curator of the project, unravels the close link between the most exquisite creator of the Rive Gauche and the avant-garde of the 20th century. From her office at the Pierre Bergé - Yves Saint Laurent Foundation, Aurélie Samuel is apologetic. The clock is fifteen minutes ahead of our appointment time for Zoom and there is a good reason…