Martin Szekely – Construction
Musée des Arts décoratifs et du Design, Bordeaux
2018
The eloquence of silence
Constance Rubini
Directrice du musée des Arts décoratifs et du Design, Bordeaux
In the former jail recreation yards1 stand three large shelves. Reduced to their simplest expression, they evoke the early abstract compositions of Mondrian, a world of horizontal and vertical lines in black and white, depicting a landscape pared down to the essential. These shelves are a tangible manifestation of the physical principles that rule our lives. Anchored to the ground, they are ineluctably drawn and stabilized by the pull of gravity. Their presence in the space reveals their mathematical precision, the result of a painstaking effort to achieve balance, based on the data of mass, gravity and the interaction of forces that most often remain invisible. Each of these pieces functions according to its own mode of existence, with a consistency arising from the organization of the components and the resulting forces that structure the whole. An approach that allows no margin for approximation. This precision is the root of their physical beauty.
Martin Szekely perceives design from the point of view of construction. He conceives structures that stand upright, in the manner of an organism maintaining its balance through interacting tensions. Devoid of any superfluous elements, his furniture creations embody a way of understanding and relating to the world by seeking out the essential, a discreet yet substantial presence.
The designer aspires to find the material components that, in combination, will make their role more efficient. Constantly striving for economy of means, he eliminates any element that can be made redundant by technological innovation or an inventive configuration: “For example, if you want to make a sliding glass door, you need a track and hangers screwed into the glass to hold the rollers that rotate around ball bearings… It takes a lot of components, whereas a single well chosen material in contact with the glass plate should be enough to permit its movement. I suspect that all true inventions are in fact linked to the idea of economy in the material and physical means involved.”2
A perpetual questioning of processes that allows him to go ever further, a stringent protocol of simplification that pushes him toward the ultimate state of the materials’resistance…Project after project, he re-examines their use and the specific functional characteristics of their assembly processes, always working within the limits of the same framework: the intended use of the object under consideration. In his Alucobond Armoire (1998), Szekely reinvented the construction of the doored cabinet by using folding instead of the conventional mechanical techniques. One can easily imagine the attention paid to every phase of the project, and the discipline that fueled empirical research on the materials’properties in order to ensure their optimal use.
Opus (2017), perhaps his most accomplished creation, is a mass that stands upright with a minimum of means. Its unity is punctuated with discontinuities, sudden gaps that could jeopardize its balance. Ingeniously combining three forms of aluminum – laminated, extruded and honeycomb – the construction is conceived to be stable and solid, despite its thin, deceptively insubstantial appearance: it looks like a silver wire stretched out in the space. We are reminded of an excerpt from Sei Shonagon’s The Pillow Book,3 written at the Imperial Court of Japan in the early eleventh century: “Things that cheer the heart:… A letter written on Michinoku paper, white and lovely, with a brush so fine that you’d think it could not produce even the thinnest stroke.” In this quest for formal reduction, Szekely nonetheless obtains an effect of magnification, a radiance in his treatment of materials – the shimmer of light as it plays across the different aluminum surfaces. “Take a stone,” explained the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor in one of his lectures. 4 “You can saw it, grind it, drill into it, split it or polish it. It will become a different thing each time. Then take tiny amounts of the same stone, or huge amounts, and it will turn into something else again. Then hold it up to the light – different again.” Szekely plays on this aspect of materials to place his objects at the frontier between commonplace elementariness and remarkable singularity.
As part of his focus on economy of means, the better to express the essence of the object, he reduces the presence of color to its strict minimum: the natural tone of the materials. Just as the American composer Morton Feldman5 discovered that sound itself can be a phenomenon possessing its own form and its own metaphoric poetry, Szekely explores the physical potential of his materials, to the exclusion of any other ornamentation. Color never appears as a narrative or figurative element in his work.
Neutrals dominate, chosen because they retain the fullest possibilities of appropriation without directing the eye. Gray, with its potential for universality, is the rule. Just as the Japanese exalt mundane things in order to give them greater meaning, the designer relies on nuances of gray. The ability to lend intensity or flavor to something that would otherwise have been ordinary is one of the qualities of his work.
The assemblies that he creates often take on an ornamental value. He juxtaposes different treatments of the same material, playing up the resulting contrasts. MAP can thus resemble the glinting surface of a pond or, conversely, be seen as a set of contrasting modules.
By exposing the cross-section of the planks in the Construction shelf, he emphasizes the reality of their multi-ply bamboo structure and takes visual advantage of the graphic lines delineated by the material. Even while proclaiming the humble nature of the bamboo chosen for this piece, he makes daring use of it. Made of planks simply held together by brass screws, the shelf is enlivened by the systematic offsetting of the flat surfaces in relation to each other. Their slightly different levels induce a feeling of disharmony, disrupting the apprehension of the whole. The lowliest of all of Szekely’s works in terms of materials turns out to be visually rich: “Something in the construction disturbs the eye and the comprehension,” he observes. “An impression of chaos, the result of a telluric movement within a fragile but nonetheless upright structure.”6
The pursuit of apparent simplicity, central to his approach, also leads him to eliminate any indication of personal expression. Although one can intuitively recognize a Szekely design on sight, it would be inaccurate to speak of a style, of that “form with no clear destination” linked to its author’s mood, as Roland Barthes7 defines it in Writing Degree Zero. Style is the metaphor of a personality, and the designer seeks to separate himself from this type of expression. His working process, as he often says, is linked to the intended use. His approach thus retreats behind the internal necessities of the object and its context, which, alone, nourish the conception of an apt form, a process that for a long time he summed up in the principle of “no more drawing.”8 His a minima vocabulary is a method for envisioning design and, more generally, a way to apprehend the world around him. Szekely belongs to that clan of artists who structure their language in reduction, as part of a quest for an absolute. He likes to refer to the correspondence of Gustave Flaubert, who, in a letter to Georges Sand,9 questions the essential function of this process: “Why does it happen that one always makes a verse when one restrains his thought too much?” Can one compare the construction of a sentence to that of an object? The spare quality of Racine’s prose, the classic author’s way of choosing the fewest words possible, has long been upheld as the purest writing, a concision also adopted as a leitmotiv by the greatest architects and designers – starting with Mies van der Rohe, the originator of the aphorism “Less is more,” so often invoked in the history of design, who, spurning formal expression, focused only on the clarity of the structure.
In the above-mentioned letter to Georges Sand, Flaubert discusses what, for him, is the ultimate purpose of art, “Namely, beauty. I remember having felt my heart beat violently, having felt a fierce pleasure in contemplating a wall of the Acropolis, a perfectly bare wall (the one on the left as you go up to the Propylaea). Well! I wonder if a book, independently of what it says, cannot produce the same effect! In the exactness of its assembling, the rarity of its elements, the polish of its surface, the harmony of its ensemble, is there not an intrinsic virtue, a sort of divine force, something eternal as a principle? (I speak as a Platonist.) Thus, why is a relation necessary between the exact word and the musical word?”
This ode to precision finds immediate resonance in Szekely’s creations. Their strict lines and the geometric patterns that they trace surprise us with their purity. The Cork storage unit (2009), part of the “simple boxes” series, is like a toy construction set, a sophisticated version of a colorless Rubik’s Cube. Each panel has its place. The cork absorbs impact and noise, creating a zone of silence around the piece. It recalls the filmmaker Johan van der Keuken quoting Ben Webster in Adventures of an Eye:10 “He plays and he says, ‘Listen, nothing is happening’.”
Beauty cannot be confined in any definition – it inevitably escapes. Yet, whether in literature, painting, music or design, there seems to be a concept to which beauty has been linked through the ages: that of precision. This is one of the factors that allow us to say that Szekely’s furniture designs are beautiful. They have the accuracy that emanates from attentive, in-depth, masterly work, when enough questions have been asked to know that there is nothing more to modify. The result is a striking, arresting purity, an efficiency that gives rise to beauty.
Although the painter Juan Miró is too lyrical a reference for Martin Szekely’s liking, it is worth quoting him for a clarification of the perception of the designer’s work: “To become truly a man, it’s necessary to become detached from one’s false self. In my case, I must stop being Miró, that is, a Spanish painter belonging to a society limited by frontiers, by social and bureaucratic conventions. In other words, we must move toward anonymity…
At the same time, we are aware of the need for an absolutely individual gesture, completely anarchic from the social point of view. Why? Because a profoundly individual gesture is anonymous. Being anonymous allows the universal to be attained.”11
This quest for universality is certainly at the heart of Szekely’s work. The words of Flaubert ring true: “Madame Bovary has nothing ‘true’ in it. It is a totally invented story; into it I put none of my own feelings and nothing from my own life. The illusion (if there is one) comes, on the contrary, from the impersonality of the work. It is a principle of mine that a writer must not be his own theme. The artist in his work must be like God in His creation – invisible and all-powerful: he must be everywhere felt, but never seen.”12
1 The old prisoners’yards are now enclosed. The jail, built in 1885 behind the Hôtel de Lalande, has housed new exhibition spaces devoted to design since 2016.
2 “Martin Szekely in a conversation with Christian Schlatter, Paris, March 1998,” in Martin Szekely, Purple Books booklet/ Kreo Armoires, undated.
3 Sei Shônagon, Notes de chevet, Paris, Gallimard/Unesco, 1985.
4 Lecture by Peter Zumthor included in Atmospheres, Birkhäuser, Basel, 2008.
5 The correlation with Morton Feldman is also present in the exhibition with some of his pieces broadcasted.
6 Martin Szekely. Œuvres récentes Private presentation, visitor’s guide, 5, place François-1er, 17 October – 17 November 2017.
7 Barthes’s description of the concept of style in a passage on the “disappearance of the author” in Writing Degree Zero (1953, French edition by Édition du Seuil, 1972, p. 18).
8 Christian Schlatter, Martin Szekely. Des étagères, Paris, Bernard Chauveau Éditeur, 2005.
9 To George Sand, Monday evening [3 April 1876.]. Flaubert’s correspondence can be found (in French) on the University of Rouen website: http://flaubert.univ-rouen.fr/correspondance/conard/lettres/lettres1.html
10 Johan van der Keuken and François Albéra, “Johan van der Keuken. Aventures d’un Regard,” Paris, pub. Cahier du Cinéma, 1998.
11 “I Work Like a Gardener,” interview with Miró by Yvon Taillandier in January 1959 for the journal XXe siècle, No. 1, (15 February 1959, monthly supplement), p. 274.
12 Letter to Mademoiselle Leroyer de Chantepie, Paris, March 18th [1857]. Correspondence of Gustave Flaubert, op. cit.