Cartier, eternal clarity
Time is the concept most abused by everyday language. It is said that time passes, that time passes. Nothing is more inaccurate. The calendars expire, the minutes are spent, the lives are consumed, the movements follow one another but time, it is always there: its permanence attests its immutability. It is quite peculiar to note that only artists, halfway between physics and philosophy, have succeeded in making us understand with precision this extraordinary nature of time: this fourth dimension that each of us has defined in his own way and in their domain, almost at the same time, Einstein and Proust. To understand this fleeting being that time represents, to capture and somehow crystallize its substance, the house of Cartier has chosen the essential path of dialogue and metaphor. It is at least the first impression that comes to our hearts and minds when we leave the masterful exhibition, aptly called “ Cartier, Crystallization of Time ” which is currently developing its magnificences and its questions at the National Art Center in Tokyo.
The exhibition is organized into three chapters defined jointly by New Material Research Laboratory, Yayoi Motohashi, curator of the museum of modern art founded in 2007 in Tokyo, in the district of Roppongi, and Pierre Rainero, director of the Image, Style and Heritage of the Cartier house. These three chapters, to which dedicated spaces are allocated, highlight the sources of the jeweler's creativity. This is expressed through the following prisms: the transformation of colors and materials, shapes and designs, world cultures and universal inspiration.
“This exhibition, insists Cyrille Vigneron, president and CEO of Cartier International since 2016, could not have seen the light elsewhere. ”These founding principles of the Cartier style are staged by the NMRL studio (New Material Research Laboratory): an architectural company founded by the illustrious contemporary artist Hiroshi Sugimoto in collaboration with the architect Tomoyuki Sakakida. NMRL, in accordance with its vocation, has reconciled traditional craftsmanship, ancestral techniques brought up to date, immemorial materials and new technologies in order to allow visitors to touch the common soul of the 300 exhibits and the quality of vision that presided over them.
The threshold of the exhibition clearly sets the tone: bordered by two imposing glass counterweights, a huge and strange clock, from the personal collection of Hiroshi Sugimoto, greets the visitor. Its case has been blackened in the fire, its mechanism has been transformed: its hands are turning upside down “ disorbitant ” thus the race of memory and chronology. Time, reminds us of NMRL, is relative, different for everyone. The second decisive moment that makes hearts throb dialogue here with the millions of years necessary for the formation of precious stones. A large dark room serves as a prologue: from the ceiling unrolled to the ground moiré and transparent fabrics which were made by Kawashima Selkon Textiles, eminent manufacture of Kyoto, known for its collaborations with the imperial house. While veiling them sacred, they frame mysterious clocks, some of which belong to the collection of the princely palace of Monaco. Because - and this is a first - more than half of the pieces presented have been loaned by customers and collectors. Most of them have never been exhibited. It is also the first time that Cartier has offered such a wide selection of contemporary creations: the last four decades of e Cartier production are very widely represented.
Panther and crocodiles…
We thus find over the halls known figures: masterpieces from the “Al Thani” collection, the adornments of the maharadjah of Nawanagar, the “Tutti Frutti” of Mrs.Cole Porter, that of Daisy Fellowes, the bracelets rock crystal by Gloria Swanson, the famous panther brooch belonging to the Duchess of Windsor with her imposing 252 carat sapphire cabochon, the crocodile necklaces by Maria Félix. Some lenders have wanted their names to be published on cartels, others have not. Overall, the indications are sober, minimal. It is not a question here of multiplying the successions of dates, historical landmarks and cultural references but rather of provoking phenomena of reminiscence, of initiating sensory experiences, of making the spectator understand that the quality of vision is the product combined, anachronistic and timeless, of memory and imagination. Contemporary creations are compared with old pieces. Their architectures, in turn geometric or organic, delicate even when they are inspired by the accident, harmonious even when they express chaos, moving even when they auscultate everyday life, respond to each other in a fruitful and nourishing dialogue. A sparkling wave of diamonds spreads its hypnotic undulations with equal relevance on a neck plate and a bracelet. And yet, a century separates the two ornaments. The neck plate was designed in 1903, the bracelet in 2014. A fern motif lying on a sketchbook from the archives of Louis Cartier flourishes a few meters further on a platinum pin, while reflecting elsewhere on a kakemono of the Heian era.
Breaths of History
The scenography imagined by NMRL gives a lot of space to the evocative materials chosen for their telluric power. Rusty steel display cases rest on rocks of volcanic origin: they all seem ready to invigorate with their magmatic energy the essential lines which have strengthened Cartier's stylistic grammar. The cypress wood, symbolizing eternal life in Greek antiquity, offers its soft polish to the busts shaped by these same craftsmen, these bushis who usually sculpt the Buddhas of Japan. These busts make up windows in the style of a Shinto sanctuary where the rings sometimes resemble miniature architectures stranded on driftwood. The Japanese cedar, the sugi, whose conical silhouette usually adorns the entrance to temples and oratories in majesty, offers all the expansion surface necessary for the exaltation of a jewelry virtuosity. Unconventional stones, such as the Southern Star, resting on a board dating from the feudal Shogunate of Kamakura, confront their legendary mineral crystallization with the breaths of History represented by a vajra scepter and a thangka scroll of Tibetan Buddhist culture. Galvanized by this scenography which delicately intertwines the threads of centuries, registers and trends, some visitors have fun dating, blindly, certain jewels. Often they are mistaken for several decades: was this necklace crowned with gourmet cabochons, whose pure and languorous curves welcome a feline coat composed of onyx, was it produced in the 1970s? 1980? This year ? No, says the cartel: it is a creation of Jeanne Toussaint - famous creative director of the House who, moreover, had made the panther his favorite animal - produced during the 1930s. The vision defies the decades. It is timeless without being immobile. And suddenly, we realize that the great strength of this exhibition, beyond the obvious manifestation of a unique mastery, is to draw in hollow, like intaglios, exhibits and studied themes, the ideal portrait of the Cartier woman: a woman capable, whatever her temperament and her sensitivity, of gathering and making fruit, with equal ease, the spirit of the times and the essence of eternity.
