Discover this artist and designer with a thousand talents who navigates between disciplines.
Born in 1975 in the Paris suburbs, Damien Gernay enrolled at the Saint-Luc Higher School of Arts (ESA) in Tournai, Belgium, in the 1990s. After graduating, he focused on set design projects for contemporary dance and theater, still in Belgium. From 2003 to 2005, he returned to France, specifically to the Le Fresnoy institution , where he was an artist-in-residence. Two years later, he founded his own design studio in Brussels.
Thriving in furniture, lighting, and accessories alike, Damien Gernay's design delights in blurring the porous boundaries between the worlds of design and art. His works reveal much about his appreciation for nature, the enigmatic, as well as for materiality, texture, and ambiguity. As for imperfections, they play a central role in his work, as they are seen as markers of each piece's uniqueness, its history, its paradoxes, and its complexities.
A regular at major events in the discipline such as PAD London & Paris or Milan Design Week, the designer has also presented his work in major institutions such as the Milan Triennale, the Design Museum in Ghent or Bozar in Brussels.
Among his most remarkable works is undoubtedly the Black Sea coffee table. Made of leather and patinated steel, it draws inspiration from the sea, as frightening as it is alluring, with its ever-changing, perpetually moving appearance: “With this piece, I tried to capture the present moment and to fix forever a fragment of the sea's surface. Leather was the obvious material for such an undertaking: leather is alive, can be molded into any shape, and its texture shares with water its caustic effect. The tabletop thus comes to life and seems to move with the reflection of light.”
Water… a recurring theme in Glaz Deep Blue. The mirror is indeed inspired by the destructive phenomenon of waves in the ocean: when two waves meet, their amplitude diminishes. A poetic and minimalist world into which one loves to immerse oneself.
