Edo

For Paris Design Week and Parcours des Mondes fair, Sandra Benhamou transformed the Lucas Ratton Gallery with a scenography, an exhibition, and a collection called Edo. She envisioned dark spaces where the power of a tribal artwork, the glow of a color, the depth of a material, and the delicacy of a curve emerge. Filtering and dimming light, she worked as one would paint a canvas. Edo speaks of earth, fire, mysterious forces, civilizations, and ages that resonate with one another.

In 1933, while the Japanese aesthete Junichirô Tanizaki published his “In Praise of Shadows”, the German artist Anni Albers left the Bauhaus and exiled herself to North Carolina with her husband, Josef. At that time, Charles Ratton, Lucas’s great-uncle and a collaborator of the Surrealists, was establishing himself in Paris as a leading expert on tribal art and forgotten cultures. Drawing on this history, these creative energies, and movements, Sandra Benhamou imagined Edo.

Edo provided the opportunity to initiate a collaboration with ceramist Flavia Broï for a series of pieces inspired by ancient forms and glazes from the depths of time. The Edo collection is complemented by a chaise longue, a console table, and a coffee table made of wrought iron and enameled lava.

Credits: Edouard Auffray

“The mysterious Orient of which Westerners speak probably refers to the uncanny silence of these dark places.”

Junichirô Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows, 1933