Discover this multi-talented artist and designer who navigates between disciplines.
Born in 1975 in Paris’s suburbs, Damien Gernay entered the École Supérieure des Arts (ESA) Saint-Luc Tournai in Belgium in the 1990s. After graduating, he turned to stage design projects for contemporary dance and theatre, again in the Plat Pays. From 2003 to 2005, he returned to France, where he was artist-in-residence at Le Fresnoy. Two years later, he set up his own design studio in Brussels.
Working in furniture, lighting and accessories, Damien Gernay’s design blurs the porous boundaries between the worlds of design and art. His work reveals much about his taste for nature and the enigmatic, as well as materiality, texture and ambiguity. As for error, it has its place in his work, seen as a marker of the uniqueness of each piece, its history, its paradoxes and its complexities.
A regular at major design events such as PAD London & Paris and Milan Design Week, the designer has also presented his work at major institutions such as the Milan Triennale, the Design Museum in Ghent and Bozar in Brussels.
Among his most remarkable works are the coffee tables in the “Mer Noire” collection. These are inspired by the sea, as frightening as it is attractive, with its ever-changing, ever-moving appearance. Made from leather and patinated steel. “With this piece, I tried to capture the present moment, and forever fix a fragment of the sea’s surface. Leather was the obvious material for such an undertaking: leather is alive can be moulded into any shape, and its texture shares its caustic effect with water. The tray thus comes to life and seems to move with the reflection of the light.”
Water, a universe that is also present in “Glaz Deep Blue”. The mirror is inspired by the destructive phenomenon of waves in the ocean: when two of them meet, their amplitude weakens. A poetic, uncluttered universe we love to immerse ourselves in.