Maarten Baas' cabinet of curiosities

A study centred on time rather than the object in a personal self-reflection with an almost suspended solution that adds patina and a new reading to many of his works and objects - just a sample of his production but an eccentric and exhaustive one. Here, Maarten Baas has collected and composed a small anthology in the small display cases he designed for the collections of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris.

The Dutch designer, known for his iconoclastic gestures, continues to intervene on key pieces in the history of modern design such as the iconic and even recent pieces (e.g. the Campana brothers' Favela chair) in his Smoke series which were burnt and re-proposed as survivors to become exemplary, their new epoxy patina giving them visibility, centrality and a different value on the contemporary market. His massive work on concept, which runs parallel to that on form, literally shapes all his subjects and the materials used via simple intuition. The process is typical of the Dutch School, learnt in Eindhoven where the designer attended the school directed by Lideweij Edelkoort.

Here, Maarten Baas leads us into a grey space that clashes with the luminous displays in the adjacent rooms and asks us to reflect on historical value, implicit in the serial nature of exhibiting design at certain museum levels.

This temporary section was inspired by 16th-century cabinets de curiosités, the forerunners of the modern museum, but also offers an opportunity to explore the complexity of the objects, eclectic whim and collecting fad market. In his half-lit room, every specific drive behind the concept of the receptacle or display case harks back to the concept of separating possession from beauty and the perception of cultural space from the object. Everything has lost all possible specific uses in this suspended world of fragments and relics.

Each of the four rooms, deliberately recreated and tidily cluttered, was designed to allow a glimpse of the objects in a blurred objectuality. So we have some almost sculptural footprints of many of Baas's famous pieces – all the more recognisable here, mostly for their red profiles or strongly handmade imprint - from the Clay collection to the surreal furniture created for The Chankley Bore series and the kitchen masterpieces in his private collection. The magic of these environments is that they are not really living rooms or kitchens, nor even closets, but rather impressions of an interior with fake mohair carpets such as Skin lying on the floor, mute frames of pictures with no subjects hanging on the walls and time being marked by an imposing Grandfather Clock.

The transience of things and the passing of time seem the true rationale behind this chapter in the work of Maarten Baas. Once the smoke has lifted and you remove what is left of the dust raised by his design, the forms born out of the political conscience that underpins some of the projects become even more indelible. The Empty Chair quietly designed for Amnesty for imprisoned Dr Liu Xiaobao's non-collection of the prize is set in a simple interior, on the wall of which is even more evocatively projected the finest of his video-clocks in the Real Time series, The Sweepers Clock, the hands of which consist in a mound of rubbish pushed about by two workers for an entire day. Ending the route, it perhaps indicates the senselessness of every specious pile of objects.
Ivo Bonacorsi

until 12.02.2012
Musée des Arts Décoratifs
www.lesartsdecoratifs.fr