Clément Cauvet

Clément Cauvet is a self taught designer and painter who was born and raised in Paris.

He's reluctant to call himself an artist and keeps his paintings to himself for now as a private means to self expression. On the contrary, the objects he creates in his artisan role are meant to find their place in the world and dress the lives of people with their weight at once sculptural and functional.

His designs combine hard and light materials such as raw cement contrasting with sharp suspended glass mirror, brass or steel elements. The hefty grimy bases both support and entrap fragile shining features. 

Clément is influenced by Bauhaus - crafting objects for him means building forms that populate environments and contribute to them. In his image, his work is always hesitant to physically evade or precisely cut through spaces with lines at once harmonious and aggressive.

Obsessed to a fault with absolute terms in aesthetics and ideas in general, he finds himself constantly negotiating the inherent physicality and obsolescence of the consumer goods he produces by embracing imperfections and rough edges in design, hoping to preempt perceptions of new or old and to counteract being possibly deemed modern, to escape belonging in time.

At once attracted to and at odds with conventional norms in art and taste in design, Clément is conflicted - refuse or give in to beauty - and his sometimes radical views translate in both brutalist bent austerity as well as generosity and (quite literally) light through the lamps he dreams up, as a commentary on his inner contradictions and those of the world around him.

This diving board in the Mediterranean is the starting point of an important creative cycle for Clément symbolizing both flight and fall, surge and abandonment, the platform of a generation in the middle sea of possibility.