
Pierre Charpin
By Alessandra Fanari, Françoise Guichon and Marco Romanelli
The French designer Pierre Charpin defines his joyously colourful, engagingly simple objects as 'receptors': 'primarily as forms, and only on a second level as functional.' This gives them a quality not out of place in two dimensions, where, he says, 'others can decide what meaning to give [them]'. It's an enjoyable pursuit, following his ideas through the stage of naïve sketching, to graphic paintings as exuberant as Matisse cut-outs and ultimately the glossy finished objects - though he prefers to call them 'things', to escape the narrowness of a definition. A lighthearted discourse between the designer and critic Marco Romanelli, journeying through the experiments of the 1980s to the triumphs of the 1990s, is the heart of the text, worth blowing past the impenetrable treatise by Alessandra Fanari to access. The curator Françoise Guichon places Charpin in a historical context, a natural successor to French masters like Auguste Rodin and Nicolas Froment.
Published by JRP Ringier, £31
Writer: Ellen Himelfarb