Faye Toogood brings new life to Matisse’s legacy

Discover the Wallpaper* guide to Salone del Mobile 2023 and Milan Design Week

‘Joyful confidence’ and ‘legendary optimism’: these are the values that drive Maison Matisse, the design studio established by Henri Matisse’s great-grandson to celebrate the late artist’s ‘joie de vivre’. To build on that legacy, Maison Matisse has enlisted Faye Toogood to create a special collaboration for Milan Design Week 2023.

Faye Toogood Maison Matisse: a black and white painterly collaboration

While previous designers enlisted by Maison Matisse – Jaime Hayon, Formafantasma, and Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec included – have focused on the riot of colour that characterised the French artist’s best-known works, Toogood has instead honed in on his form. More specifically, she has looked at his lesser-known black and white drawings, 1943’s Dessins: Thèmes et Variations most of all.

Using black Chinese ink on white paper, the drawings served as a study of the fluidity and momentum of Matisse’s gestures and the liberty of his lines. Toogood adopted the practice, filling sheets of concertina paper with her own ink experiments and improvisations to ‘create my own library of shapes,’ she explains.

Those shapes and freehand drawings were then taken off the page to create the ‘Esquisses’ collection: incorporating them as flat patterns on soft wool blankets and hand-knotted rugs, and into three-dimensional furniture, too. ‘I’m always fascinated by the play between two-dimensional and three-dimensional creation,’ says Toogood. 

The hand-upholstered bouclé armchair best evokes the equilibrium and elegance of still-life: the curved sides arching like Matisse’s balanced lines, while also creating voids that echo the negative space that give his life drawings space and scale. The wood and metal employed for the coffee table and stool are tempered and mattified respectively to instil in them a sense of easy comfort, just as the undyed yarn from Cc-tapis (a Maison Matisse collaborator since 2020) lends the thick, hand-tufted rugs. 

‘Far from stand-alone items, these are pieces that harness artisanal craftsmanship to gather value, history and design to bring joy to both present and future generations to come,’ comments Jean-Matthieu Matisse.

Though this collaboration marks a first formal collaboration between Toogood and Maison Matisse, the work of the artist has long been a source of inspiration for the London-based designer. In 2017, Toogood dedicated her ‘Assemblage 5’ collection to Matisse’s Chapelle du Rosaire in Vence, for which he famously created every last detail – from the stained glass and tiles, to the priest’s vestments. ‘The totality of the chapel informed a real spiritual connection in me, and I continue to have a long-term connection to Matisse’s legacy,’ explains the designer. It’s an enduring association which has now created heirloom-worthy objects, it would seem.

The ‘Esquisses’ collection by Faye Toogood for Maison Matisse is on show during Milan Design Week, from 17 – 22 April 2023

Maison Matisse showroom
Studio Nerino
Via Santa Marta, 21
5 Vie, 20123, Milan

maison-matisse.com
fayetoogood.com