A multiplied head has settled in the following pages. Drawing has landed in sketchbooks kept day by day. Yet when you know matali crasset a little, the day is endless: the day that gives her the time, the moment to get to work, pages that are extended as in a flip book whose message is that cats always land back on their feet.
Once that moment is over, a flight is orchestrated along the flow of a line traced with a free hand. These are days of discipline. Facing her open sketchbook matali crasset is on duty ... a thousand and probably more drawings are here!
There is a true joy in filling a page, then another, and another one, and voilà! The sketchbook calls for the next one.
It is reassuring to see the body in all its parts, with its sleights of hand, its hand-to-hand fights, its ugly fights, its meatheads and shitfaces, writhing and getting accessorized. It is as if the production of objects and devices at work in three dimensions––something customary for a designer––was reallocated and fixed to the body of our fellow creatures, who in turn become mutated artifacts, for the life span of those lines.
It is a pleasure to note that the body grows perfectly, as is invasive hair before a cut. Armpit hair, pubic hair, on the head or the torso, body hair or scalp hair here come into play not so much like a fly in the ointment but rather like the offshoot of a plant, in the same way as any other kind of tubing, like a novel benign growth that ends up proving attractive after all.
Undated, this micro history of hirsute hair draws a little from the confined situation we just have gone through, with absolute obedience. Create a journal, in passing.
Turning the pages and seeing faces outfitted with doors, shutters, or crenels proves informative. Here is the "becoming home" of a non-gendered face, the most unexpected surprise in this book that gathers several hundred precise,
fa' presto drawings, scanned from these notebooks filled with steadfastness and diligence by the artist.
Implied narratives are cumulative sequences in the style of the house that Jack built, twisting an initial shape—but one that plays out like a piece of a chain whose first links have been forgotten—in a string of additions, until this final temporary point.
For want of a cheesy heart made with hands, we'll relish a weaving made out of two orthogonal hands. I have caught odds and ends I'm content to note down, for when darn things will resume. Upon my soul, darning is the name for it!
We know matali crasset's rainbow palettes, she who trusts colors to enliven the rather strict shapes of objects and built situations she gets commissions for. Here we have a monochrome commission: some black for the lines, some grayscale for neoliberals––something she evidently isn't. A clear line without deletions or crossed out parts is expressed on paper, at the same breakneck speed pages are turned. We'll get back to it later, more slowly. In wanting to find again the path of a thought that reveals itself shamelessly, under our very eyes. matali crasset has a sense and a taste for a community she draws here in a realistic, pre-digital manner, by making interpersonal links visible—someone's arm is extended into cables connected to the other's arm. The digital era has banned wires and cables further and further, only leaving people's traces in the history of our erasable memories.
Science Fiction had thought out this "plug and play," these tethers and cables linking mankind to machines, machines to machines and cosmonauts and astronauts to each other.
With well-mannered aliens' tentacles, spring branches or deer antlers, this book's threads unfold along cool narratives. Medieval references find their rightful place here when crenels, hennins, iron masks, and hinge-mounted shutters wrap up these drawn heads—cuckoo clock heads.
Design creates this body growth in that the accessory is considered as a new part of a mutant yet familiar and reassuring body.
Sexual forays are rare but present, when uncontrolled hair growth is displayed on a naked male body in cascades of facial hair, scalp hair, or armpit and body hair. If nature has reclaimed its rights and suspended all harvests of wild grasses, humans have let their bush do its thing under the sun!
That sketchbook #7 invites
Roger Tallon's famed 1966
M400 spiral staircase (or its hybrid interpretation) or Gae Aulenti's 1965
Pipistrello lamp (today's aptly named scapegoat) is a way to pay her dues to her peers, and to the pleasure of a spiraled and symbolic kind of drawing.
No more, no less!
Franck Gautherot
Matali Crasset (born 1965 in Chalons en Champagne, lives and works in Paris) has a background in
industrial design. As exemplified by one of her emblematic objets, the column of hospitality
When Jim goes to Paris, Crasset questions the evidence of the codes that govern our daily life, in order to free oneself from it and to experiment. Thus she develops new typologies articulated around principles such as modularity,
appropriation, flexibility, and network. Her work is characterized by the refusal of pure shape, and is thought as a dynamic research made of hypothesis. She collaborates in various fields such as handicraft,
electronic music, scenography, furniture design,
graphic design, and interior design. Matali Crasset spent her childhood in a small village in the north of France, in a farm where work and life were intimately bound.
