Incollect Magazine - Issue 6

Incollect Magazine 21 Jacques Jarrige, Leda Floor Lamp, 2019. Ash. Photo: Garret Linn explored expressions of faith and spirituality in his art, creating sculpture for the Church of Saint John the Divine in New York, as well as furniture and sculpture for the newly rebuilt Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris. He works on sculpture and collectible design furniture simultaneously in the studio, producing 2-3 pieces of collectible design and lighting a month. The process is slow as he insists on making everything himself, though recently he has employed an assistant to help him. Then there are the commissions from A-list clients such as Victoria Hagan, Bespoke Interiors, Alyssa Kapito, William McIntosh, and many, many more. He has also designed interiors for François Bellet in Brussels, art dealers Almine Rech and Bernard Ruiz- Picasso in Paris, and the Hotel Pullman in Miami. Though Jarriage’s shapes and forms are rather simple, their simplicity belies the existential complexity of his thinking. His designs are initially arrived at through sketches and drawings or a maquette made by hand with a little piece of aluminum or wood. “Sometimes I have a feeling that my hand is being guided without me knowing it,” he says, gesturing towards the divine as a source of inspiration. “I was at first surprised by this way of working but it was my disposition and the way I wanted to work. I do little things, small pieces, then a big one.” Jarrige studied architecture for four years at the École Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris but was put off by the relentlessly geometric, Modernist doctrine of the program. He yearned for something organic, spiritual, and handmade. His next step was to study decorative arts and set about experimenting to find his own way of working. “I had zero technical vocabulary and had to find my own way and my own processes,” he says. The material gives him the final form, Jarrige believes. “I have to be in this dialogue with the material from the beginning,” he says. He works with wood but more recently has experimented with metals, like aluminum, for sculpture. “I have to be in a kind of a dance with the material at one time, like a real human relationship, day after day. I directly work on and into solid wood pieces. There are no corrections, so whatever happens happens. The piece has all the marks, and scars of the process, good and bad.” Jarrige likens his process (be it for collectible furniture or sculpture) to an intense conversation. “If it is going well for me I am in this position to collect the gift of the dialogue that the wood or the metal is giving me. I am working away trying to achieve something but I am also waiting to receive the gift of the material. It is this release that is the final design or object for me. I have to feel like I am in a position to participate in something when I work, to meet the dialogue with the material.”