Paris, 11th arrondissement. Just a few steps from Avenue Parmentier, a quiet street on the edge of a small square. The small shops of the past have given way to offices. Most have kept their traditional storefronts and wooden shutters that fold closed in the evening. In the window of one of these former shops, passersby catch sight of a collection of scale models. A pedestal table, a sofa, a coffee table, a floor lamp: at first, they look like toys. The precision of the details and the subtlety of the tones suggest otherwise. These are terracotta maquettes of some of the furniture and lighting pieces imagined by Mattia Bonetti. Their style flirts with the baroque or, on the contrary, embraces the purest minimalism. “There is no single thread linking my creations; I reinvent myself with each project,” explains the designer.
Mattia Bonetti, Poet and Designer
April 7, 2026
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Featured & Related Artworks
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Featured Artist
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Mattia Bonetti
The life of Mattia Bonetti stands as a testament to the vast creative potential of ambiguity, uncertainty, paradox, and duality-and absolute refusal to be one thing when it is possible to embody a multitude of possibilities simultaneously. His work exemplifies a certain strand of postmodernism that is both practical and theoretical; it embodies a philosophy of instability and witty subterfuge–a celebration of the principal of both/and rather than either/or and the quality in which everything, even identity, stays fluid. The combination of this philosophy and a dedication to the highest and most traditional standards of French classical workmanship, found within the ateliers of artisans and trained apprentices, results in an oeuvre whose inspiration (and perhaps insolence) is matched by its formal integrity. This ambiguity might even be traced through Bonetti’s own biography, from his homeland of the Ticino region, which incorporates the bravura exuberance of Italy and the rigor and integrity of Swiss culture, to a childhood in the sixties, surrounded by both the authenticity of traditional antiques and the radical experiments of the era. But apart from such weary design tropes as “zeitgeist” and “upbringing,” what Bonetti ultimately embodies is the sheer visceral pleasure of the artist, the creative imagination let loose, regardless of whether the results are to be hung upon a wall or tethered to domestic use.
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