Michel Haillard



About the man: the curve that follows the evolution of a style or movement seems to go from simplicity to complexity: the capitals of Greek columns go from the formal purity of the Doric to the enrichment of the Ionic to finally achieve the exuberant charge of the Corinthian. The same early essential Gothic style progressively leads to the richest splendor and the neoclassical Renaissance transfigures the Baroque to explode into the excessive Rococo. We could say that Michel Haillard's furniture is the creations of an exotic and paradoxical Baroque design. Design - a term of English origin, initially used in the sense of "project" and in French adopted to express the balance between design and project - is the search for new forms adapted to their functions (Robert). The term baroque, for its part, derives from the Portuguese "barroco" (you have to roll your r's to pronounce it), irregular pearl or wild pearl. As a synonym Robert adds to it: bizarre, eccentric and irregularly shaped. Michel Haillard's furniture joins the inspiration of these two notions with astonishing mastery. Are his armchairs, his dressers, his sofas useful, then? Certainly: the armchairs are the thrones of tribal leaders, of people who hold important offices or of people who are aware of the relative value of this decorum; his dressers are treasure chests for documents or precious and secret objects; his sofas house unbridled but outwardly dominated passions, where the asymmetrical disorder is balanced by the forms and objects that compose it. These objects, Michel Haillard has been collecting them for several years because of his explorations and research. Exploration is the right term since what he calls "tribal poursuire" (a definition by which eccentricity perfectly reflects: the character of his works) is both wild (since it is pleasantly blunt) and playful (since it does not exclude a secondary humor). Haillard mixes the undeniable nature of his materials-horns or defenses of different origins, leopard, crocodile and zebra skins that have already been trophies of several generations of hunters-with a fantastic spirit, a free imagination, a manifest nostalgia for solemnity and irony. His "poursuite" is at the same time coherent creation and deliberately extended; it is creation of the unexpected, the unusual, while it remains tribal in its character of high artistic value while retaining in sub-glory, the conscious sense of excess.

An artist who cannot be traced back to a precise context because of his wholly personal way of modifying the objects of nature that happen to be in his hands, of working them so that they subject themselves to new functions (Duchamp could be his uncle) and of investing them, without denaturing them, with an unsuspected noble use. By him, two styles, two resources of inspiration, two uses of an artistic creation meet, find their agreement and unity in the phantasmagorical vision of an artist who, instead of submitting to the imperative of his materials, subjects them to the thunderbolt of his creative spirit.


Wim Toebosch (International Association of Art Critics).