British Vogue: Lea Mestres
French artist and designer Léa Mestres, 33, makes naive, whimsical furniture – think donut-shaped tables and bulbous benches – that’s inspired by designers including Wendell Castle, Kenzo Takada and Gaetano Pesce, and sculptors such as Kathleen Ryan, as well as her childhood growing up in Paris watching Looney Tunes, Wallace and Gromit and Missy Elliott videos. But she’s increasingly becoming known for her floor and table lamps – sculptural creations with exaggerated proportions (sometimes towering more than two metres in height) often rendered in acid-bright colours. “I like working with lamps – I use them as a pretext to apply my ideas to them,” she says. “They can be any size I want, gigantic or tiny, but they give an energy to the room.”
Mestres gravitated to the arts after struggling at school. “I wasn’t very focused. I was happier making things in my bedroom or having fun with my friends,” she recalls. She went on to study design at Ésad in Reims, France, and later, contextual design at Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands, where she would come to a revelation: “I learnt that you could make furniture like an art piece.”
Now Mestres is part of a cohort of designers who are elevating the humble light to an art form, privileging imperfection and experimentation along the way. Upstate New York-based Katie Stout’s intricate insect- and flower-adorned chandeliers feature in the permanent collections of museums worldwide. Swiss artist Carmen D’Apollonio creates anthropomorphic bronze-tinted clay lamps, which can be found at New York’s Friedman Benda gallery. Another artist turned lighting designer, James Cherry, makes ethereal resin-coated fabric lamps for fans including actors Murray Bartlett and Benito Skinner.
Experimentation is a cornerstone for Mestres: for a solo show last year, she painstakingly covered her tables and lamps with thousands of mosaic tiles depicting landscapes from Barcelona and the south of France to Dubai. “I’d been thinking about using mosaics for a long time,” she says. “It’s extremely time-consuming but the end result is worth the effort.” For those who want to experience her playful furniture up close, the Carpenters Workshop Gallery in London will host a joint show with French designer Martin Laforêt in June. And what does she hope visitors will take away from encountering her surreal creations in the wild? “I hope it gives people a break from this brutal world,” she says.
