To celebrate the launch, the Bouroullecs have created a site-specific textile installation exhibited at the spacious, soon-to-open new Kvadrat flagship showroom at Åsögatan in Södermalm. The occasion will double as a sneak preview of what will become Kvadrat’s new Stockholm address, also under the creative direction of Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec and open to the public later in 2018.
The installation showcases the textiles Rennes and Chainette, which are based on a custom made room divider originally created for an exhibition of Bouroullec brothers’ work in Rennes.
Ronan Bouroullec: “Embroidery has always been something important to me. The area where we come from, Brittany, has a long tradition about it. I remember the traditional clothes with gold yarns from when I was a young child. Since this period, I have always had an interest for it – the delicacy, the lightness, the relation with drawings of this technique.”
Those two collections are based on embroidery techniques. But while they share the same pattern, they are different.
Rennes features wide, diagonal and vertical, densely stitched stripes which intersect, creating bold colorful forms. Chainettes is more subtle, it's made of thin lines embroidered with braids.
Those curtains are designed to play with light and shadow. Rennes gets intensely colorful when lighten, where Chainettes is more transparent. The thin indication of colors inside the lines softly react to the light.
Embroidery, even mechanical, has a very subtle way of enhancing the curtains and what happens when you see through. The yarns somehow model the surface while informing very smartly the colors. It still conveys a certain memory of old handcrafted embroideries, but our approach to patterns and the context of Kvadrat brought us to this very engineered and precise technique.
