Animal design

For Bien venus!, the Château de Châteaudun presents a selection of design works from the collection of the Centre national des arts plastiques, all of which share a relationship with the animal world.

Some pieces directly draw on animal forms, such as Jean-Philippe Gleizes’s Orque chair in folded sheet metal, which adopts the silhouette of the marine mammal; Francesco Binfaré’s Pack sofa, where a bear lies on a drifting ice floe; and the Radi Designers’ Whippet Bench, which stretches the slender outline of a whippet—an archetypal hunting dog—into a bench.

Others explore our relationship with animals, such as Laura Couto Rosado’s Skinspecies silk scarves, which cover the face like bird and wolf masks, inviting us to adopt their perspectives.

These works take the form of animals that inhabit the Longueville wing of the monument, coexisting in hybrid forms that evoke a surrealist imagination.

The presence of a work by Meret Oppenheim, a major figure of this movement, underscores this lineage through her side table Traccia, whose legs are sculpted as bird’s claws.

Pucci de Rossi’s Peau d’ours carpet and Trophée Grand élan d’Atlanta (Big American Moose) resonate with the sculpted figure of a deer enthroned on the mantelpiece of one of the monument’s grand fireplaces. Its removable head allowed the duke to display his latest trophy, recalling that big-game hunting was the preserve of the nobility. Pucci de Rossi subverts this tradition with his Grand élan, whose antlers sketch the name of a famous American brand, transforming the hunting trophy into a metaphor for consumer society. Through humour and by drawing on the fascination that the animal kingdom inspires in designers, this ensemble allows wildlife to take over one of the château’s two great state rooms.

The hybridity of forms takes on an organic dimension with the works of Studio GGSV, founded by French designers Gaëlle Gabillet and Stéphane Villard. Their Ghost Bless You jars go beyond conventional definitions of design to move into the realm of sculpture. Incorporating a performative dimension, these creature-objects even appear to breathe. Animated by an almost ghostly presence—their title makes this explicit—the jars, with a touch of humour, come to haunt the remarkable monument that is the Château de Châteaudun.