Mural compositions, furniture, unique works

He creates material finishes, textures and colours, which he applies to interior architecture and furniture. His approach is inspired by nature ( vegetatal, mineral ...), the history and tradition of colours throughout the world, which leads to contemporary creations bearing traces of the memories of these techniques.

His work is structured by light, materials and colours. Rich with 25 years of research, he has established an environment in his studio, to create unique works, objects (cigar box), furniture (tables, console, folding screens) and geometric polychrome mural compositions.

His creations may be placed in contemporary environments as well as in historical frameworks, where his research of aesthetic rythmns create a link a future. In this way the Institut of France, which is dressed with a mural polychrome composition, in variations of red, "these reds complementary to the green of the French Academy", the reception room of the Grand Chancelier, and in "a polychromy of greens in all its states," the Club of Academicians.

He works regularly with architects and interieur architects, his profound knowledge of materials and colours leads him from time to time to advise architects and clients on the overall aesthetics of a project. His creativity responds to the wishes of private clients as well as professionals.

Restoration of gilded and polychrome wood

He has obtained the Prize for Heritage craftsmen in 1997, and since 2003 he is entitled by the Direction des Musées de France to restore the works of art of their collections. The other orders for restoration of pieces of furniture, gilded wood objects and polychrome wood are coming from private collections from Europe and North America : frames, tables, consoles, chairs, chemney cases….

Painter on fabrics

Coming from Argentina in the 70s to find out his European roots, he has above all rediscovered the lost secrets of this very delicate painting on velvet, as it used to be made by a mill of the 18th-century.

His talent as painter with a luminious palette on the most fragile fabrics has quickly raised the interest of the great couturiers (Dior, Balanciaga), and the interior decorators.

Painted decoration on walls, furniture, woven

On the walls of the famous pastry shop Ladurée of the rue Bonaparte in Paris, the thirty botanical panels on wood, made the ancient way, with skin glue and agate polished, have been realized in this atelier, under the roofs, hidden in a private park near Montparnasse..

There she paints on wood, and on fabrics (velvet, silk, ottoman), furnishing decors for the exclusive clientele’s mansions or for hotels, offices, boutiques. In collaboration with decorators who bring their cartoons or who ask her to give free rein to her creativity, knowing that she possesses perfectly her craft…

Lacqueur 

She carries out the lacquer art according to the traditional Chinese and Japanese techniques. Millennial techniques, born in the Far-East, which became a recognized art in Europe during the « Art Deco » period. She uses either the vegetal lacquer, or the « European » lacquer, and applies them in restoring or in creating.

The connoisseurs appreciate the delicacy of her restorations on stamped furniture of the eighteenth century or Art Deco, on Japanese sabres, or on samurai helmets.

The contemporary ceramists, as well as the collectors, are seduced by her famous restorations with « gold lacquers » (« kintsugi ») on ceramics. Based on Japanese philosophy, this technique, with vegetal lacquer (« urushi ») and gold powder, leaves a trace on the object, without harming its re-utilization.

In her creations, she works on wood, metal, glass… In decoring techniques, she practises incrustations of pigments, gold powder (« maki-e »), gold flakes (« nashiji »), gold- and silver leaves (for the oxidizings), egg-shells, mother of pearl, chiseling…

Special prize of the Ishikawa International Design Competition in Japan in1999, « Best craftman of France in 2004, then president of the jury in 2005, she is teaching the lacquer art at the Atelier de Paris.

Sculptor of Wood, Restorer, Creator

He has created his atelier in Enghien, near Paris in 1992

The more he advances in this craft, the more his passion for the ornament increases. The practice of the different styles from the 15th to the 20th centuries enriches his art every day by the rigor and the exactness which it requires.

Antique dealers, museums, restorers, collectors entrust him with their objects ; they know that he will try to give life again to these wounded objects, by intervening on the sculpture in the spirit of its creator and by repeating the adapted motions.

For certain commands, he recreates and re-composes for decorators exceptional pieces (chairs, frames, consoles, wood paneling, etc …)

Through his experience of restoration and fabrication, he creates contemporary ornaments (tranlucid wooden lamps, luminaries, wall lamps …and his recent exhibition in a Left Bank Parisian gallery was a revelation to many collectors and connoisseurs.

Straw marquetery

A poor material, simple tools : the straw marquetery is born from little. But it demands patience, length of time et the delicacy of the gestures – like with the nuns and even the convicts. It can reach an extreme refinement. Great inlayers of the eighteenth century have used it to adorn jewel-objects and delicate chests.

Like the « poudreuse » offered to the Marquis de La Fayette at the end of the eighteenth century (where each detail gives evidence to his appartenance to the Freemasonry), restored by her.

This passion was inherited from her grandfather, the decorator of the twenties, and results in restorations for private clients and antique dealers. But she creates also : wall decors for mansions in New York and Palm Beach , or the apartment of the owner of the hotel « Four Seasons » in New York, with the decorator Peter Marino.

Since the rye straw, of an apparent fragility, proofs its robustness defying centuries.

Cabinetmaker-restorer of chairs and furniture

His cabinetmaker atelier receives often, the most discretely, somptuous furniture, Boulle marqeteries, delicate chairs, stamped or of beautiful workmanship, sometimes historical (like Napoleon’s armchair from Sainte-Helene).

So you can imagine his pleasure to have been able to explain to a small group of connoisseurs the qualities of an exceptional flat bureau, Louis the Sexteenth epoch, stamped Joseph Baumhauer called Joseph.

Because this rare bureau, ornated on its complete belt with 24 plates made of tender porcelain from Sevres, painted with flower bouquets, had attained the highest selling price of French furniture – record still valid today….

And if this conservation and restoring work has been entrusted to him, it is because his reputation of knowledge and savoir faire, of expertise and of intransigence in honesty, is well known among the international world of connoisseurs, collectors and art dealers.

As well as his part as a expert-counsel beside collectors who want to know the invisible face of the furniture they would like to acquire.

Restoration and recontruction of antique locks

His profession : Gold, silver and locksmith (orfèvre serrurier)… He opened a lock-restoration atelier in 1976 in a château in the Dordogne region. Since then, his fine, high-quality work has come to be highly esteemed by connoisseurs, and the trust of the antique locksmithing museum « Le Secq des Tournelles » in Rouen.

His work ranges over 16th-, 17th- and 18th-century furniture locks, including reconstructing lost or detoriated elements for chest-of-drawers, desks and libraries ; objets d’art and collectors’ items such as  chests, padlocks, and door locks for museums, antiques dealers and individuals with inherited valuables who wish to maintain them in good working order

Restorer of scientific instruments, globes and « eglomized » glasses

His work is very far-ranging, involving techniques which all require painstaking expertise and extreme precision :

• the restoration of scientific instruments from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, used in  medecine, physics, oceanography, surveying ; and gnomonic instruments for measuring time by the sun ;

• the restoration of 17th- and 18th-century terrestrial, celestial, planetary globes and armillary spheres, the latter showing the position of the earth and the planets with respect to the sun ;

• the restoration of « eglomizd » glassware, which is decorated with gold leaf fixed beneath the glass and engraved with a point. His expertise in this little-known field has gradually led him to specialize in…

• the study and design of « eglomized » glassware, with engraved gold decoration, for use in interior decoration : picture frames, mirrors, furniture, etc.

Restoring of painted furniture 18th- 19th century, paintings and patines

She has established her painted furniture restoring atelier in the « faubourg Saint-Antoine », the traditional Parisian district of cabinet-makers, ten years ago. Using techniques inherited from the ancient guild of  « Painting-and gilding Masters » - like the paint based on rabbit skin glue-, she restores and rediscovers the original colours, or proposes new tints.

18th-century furniture, frames, consoles, seats or easy-chairs ornated with « réchampis », wait for their restoration or transformation. Here, each tool, each colour is the reflection of a  precise detailed and colourful work, faithful to its epoch. Gustavian grey, yellow ochre pigments, baroque red, making her shelves shimmering palettes.

In her clear and calm atelier she knows how to re-create the beautiful colours, the soft materials, the shadow and light effects of the olden days. She scrathes, hammers, giving the illusion of a natural wear, imagines the traces left by the sun, the dust or the hands, the small cracks, like a study of time…

Already known by many collectors, international antique dealers, working for the « National Furniture », she  reminds the history of these object and gives them a soul for a new life.

Bronze makers

He has a passion, the gilded bronze.

More precisely, gilded bronze dating from the 18^th century when, following the rigidity of the reign of Louis XIV, bronze makers began to give free expression to their personal creativity. In this way they attained their renowned audacity for a profusion of nervously chased curved linear rythms, which brought forth “the voluptuousness of the metal through a subtle play of generous colors and deeply contrasted shadows”.

From this tradition originates the excellence we recognize in his expertise which restores,  as well as the respect and wonder he  experiences when confronted with the quality  of these bronzes confided to him by his private clients, and museums, such as the Louvre Museum and the Château of Versailles.

Each intervention of preservation and restoration must give sufficient readability to the object, by renewing it’s original aspect, as well as stability,  so as to asssure it’s preservation in the future. The restoration and preservation of gilded bronzes, or the restitution of missing pieces, is accomplished in this atelier, where he is seconded by workmen certified by the “Metiers d’Art”.