Taking inspiration from birds seen while traveling, French designer Paul Mathieu has translated the elegant shape of an airborne wing into hand-cast bronze, creating a series of striking pieces for his latest lighting collection, now on display at West London’s Willer art and design gallery.
The Aile (Wing) collection currently includes four designs: two short sconces (one left wing, one right); a floor sconce with a long tail, if you will, that runs parallel to the wall; and a table lamp. The made-to-commission pieces, created at Mathieu’s studio in Aix-en-Provence in the South of France, will be available in both a light and a dark finish. Thanks to a polished interior, the lamps emit warm reflections or “golden shadows,” as Mathieu himself calls them, when hung against the wall.
Best known for his furniture designs that fuse natural forms and materials with more stringent, modernist silhouettes, Mathieu excels at seamlessly melding the natural and the manmade, and his latest collection proves no exception.
“Aile represents a new exploration in more organic textures and patination, and it reveals further references to nature, as in the twiglike ‘stalk’ of the floor sconce,” says Rebecca Willer, who also represents the acclaimed sculptor Lynn Chadwick (for a limited-edition candelabra) and glass artist Masuda Hiromi, among others. “These unusual shapes give off the most amazing reflections, creating an aesthetic that is at once brutal in material, yet somehow soft and entirely elegant.”
Starting at $6,900; willero.uk
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