“Drawing is like meditating”: the hypnotic artwork of Ronan Bouroullec

Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec is one of the best known and most prolific design studios in the world. According to a rough estimate, in the last 20 years they have signed more than 200 projects with the best companies of this sector: Artek, Alessi, Axor Hansgrohe, Cappellini, Established & Sons, Flos, Hay, Kettal, Kvadrat, Kartell, Glas Italia, Issey Miyake, Ligne Roset, Magis, Iittala, Mattiazzi, Mutina, Nani Marquina, Samsung, Vitra. Founded in Paris by the brothers Ronan (born in 1971) and Erwan Bouroullec (born in 1976), the studio employs just six people, like a craftsman’s workshop. Among the many well-known works, we recall the Vases combinatories, the very first vases for Cappellini produced in 1998; the do-it-yourself Twigs and Algae separé curtains, from 2004 produced by Vitra; the Central folding table for Magis from 2010 or the Ring bench installed around a large apple tree at the Vitra Campus. Surprisingly, behind the rich design production we discover an equally thriving artistic production of one of the two founders, Ronan Bouroullec.

In design schools they teach that drawing is the primary tool for becoming a good designer. They show us how the masters of the past had in common a great ability to draw freehand. People like Gio Ponti, Alessandro Mendini, Ettore Sottsass drew continuously, tirelessly: drawing was their form of communication and thought. Although this technique is no longer the discriminating factor between a good and a bad designer (fortunately), today hand drawing remains the common denominator of many well-known designers. Just think of the cartoonish stroke of archistar Bjarke Ingels or that of Mexican architect Rozana Montiel. Among designers, Ronan Bouroullec takes a step forward. His abstract drawings, a succession of sinuous and colorful lines, erase the division between designer and artist, leading us to ask if in order to be a good designer one should not, first of all, be a good artist. “I’m passionate about both, I don’t see any hierarchy: I’m as concerned with drawing as I am with space,” answers Ronan Bouroullec.

Born in Brittany in 1971, left-handed, he started his design studio with his brother Erwan in 1998. Seventeen years later, in 2014, he posted a drawing for the first time on his Instagram account (@ronanbouroullec). Since then he delights his fans with posts of organically shaped drawings made with markers, graphite or ballpoint pen, which collect thousands of likes. However, what we see in a frame of a few pixels in reality are large drawings of at least 60 x 80 cm, made with an almost maniacal precision and skill, indeed “obsessive” as defined by Sarah Cosulich, curator and director of the Pinacoteca Agnelli. For those who want to see them live, the exhibition “The sound of my left hand” (open till the 20th of May 2022) in Milan, curated by Sarah Cosulich and set up at Casa Mutina in via Cernaia 1, where Ronan Bouroullec’s drawings are exhibited together with the products made for Mutina ceramics company. “The sense of the exhibition is to create an atmosphere that restores the taste of beauty in life, from bathroom tiles to bizarre designs. It’s my personal pleasure, the only thing that I can do,” explains Ronan Bouroullec.

When asked what drawing means in his design profession, he answers that “drawing is something I do at night, at the end of the day, on the weekend.” “It’s something I do completely on my own, outside of my studio, in the kitchen or living room. It’s a very intimate practice, extremely free, in the sense that when I start I don’t know what I’m going to do, it’s not something I plan. It’s very intuitive, instinctive. It’s like meditation. I start with a blank sheet of paper and then lines, lines and lines until I create a form. Then when it’s finished, I forget about it.

His work has been described by art critics and designers, with words collected in the catalog The sound of my left hand, published by Mutina for Art. Here Sara Cosulich describes Ronan Bouroullec’s artistic work as “anthropomorphic or organic”, an introspective practice where the constant observation of reality “is reduced to a visceral form”. French designer Inga Sempé dwells on the technical difficulty of his works, “in his drawings the trajectories do not allow for errors. The attention that guides the hand is not fragmented into episodes: it is like the sea that, if photographed a few hours later, no longer has the same force or the same reflections. A drawing is a series woven together, without distractions, from the first stroke to the last curve”. Art critic Nicolas Trembley, on the other hand, explains that the drawings Bouroullec has been making for a long time seem to him as the continuation of ancestral craft practices. “These graphic forms consisting of sinuous lines juxtaposed one against the other refer to the art of Japanese calligraphy. There is something spiritual in this exercise, a meditative space in which the line travels and then stops at the silent rhythm of the breath. A routine that begins at the center of the sheet and then arrives at the randomness of the gesture that the artist compares to the technique of weaving”. 

But what is the difference between drawing abstract lines and designing a design product? “Design is a collective situation where you work with the engineer, with the company,” Bouroullec answers, “it’s a very long and often very frustrating process because there are waves of happiness over an idea, followed by depression when you find out it’s too expensive or takes too long to realize. Drawing is a way to heal from this mechanism, it’s a daily practice, an instant satisfaction that no one can alter, that is totally free. And I like both.

Opening image: Ronan Bouroullec, drawings via his Instagram account, @ronanbouroullec