Creativity Intersects at Salon Art + Design NY 2025

Géraldine Cornette de Saint Cyr is a Paris-based French ceramist whose work is rooted in the transformative power of craft. She approaches each piece as both a tactile experience and a narrative object, where every detail invites the imagination to wander.

Her creations intentional and useful, adorned with echoing motifs drawn from a wide range of inspirations: tribal art, Art Deco, the shifting seasons, and the natural textures of wood, stone, or woven fibers.

The result is a collection of unique pieces that are at once dense and delicate, animated by matter and light. Each piece tells its own story, not only through its form but through the dialogue it creates between utility and artistry. In her hands, clay becomes a language—one that speaks to the resilience of craft and the enduring power of the handmade.

Raised by a textile artist mother and furniture designer father, Bucharest-born French Romanian artist Alexandra Mocanu grew up immersed in the world of handcrafted arts. Surrounded by the tools and materials of her parents’ workshop, Mocanu began to discover her own artistic perspective, first through photography, then painting and tapestry. She arrived at her chosen materials by instinct, exploring the contrasts between the immediacy of painterly gesture and the constraints of realism. She currently works out of her studio in Pantin, France. Imprinted with the rhythms of spontaneous gestures, Mocanu’s potent wall tapestry works are made of wool woven on canvas, with lines and colors meticulously threaded so as to appear at first glance to be painted in a single bold stroke. Her pieces begin as paintings in gouache, which are then painstakingly spun upon a loom into a tapestry. The expressive quality of Mocanu’s work belies her considered approach, in which a decisive brushstroke is slowed down into a time bending illusion woven with countless threads. At times spontaneous, other times more intentional, Mocanu’s abstract compositions assert a gap in the verisimilitude of mark making. Mocanu was given the contemporary design award for her work shown at PAD Paris in 2018, which was called “colorful, luminous, and original” by PAD Paris Jury President Marie-Laure Jousset, speaking to Le Quotidien de l’Art. “Tapisseries,” Mocanu’s debut New York exhibition at Twenty First Gallery, received coverage from Architectural Digest, Surface, AN Interior, Brown Harris Stevens, and Cover.

Born in France in 1973, Erwan Boulloud graduated from Ecole Boulle in 1995, then assisted in the workshops of renowned designers such as Hubert Le Gall and Hervé Van Der Straeten, as well as working at the Louvre, the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers (CNAM) and the Museum of Natural History as a set designer presenting artworks and artifacts. In 2003, he opened his own studio in Paris, later moving to Montreuil where he works today. His furniture, made in limited numbered editions, fuses a variety of technical processes and aesthetic moods and boasts an ease with a range of high quality materials including wood, bronze, brass, steel, glass, gold leaf, inlaid precious stones, and even preserved exotic butterfly specimens. His showstopping creations don’t adhere to any existing styles, but rather take their direction from Boulloud’s rigorous intellectual quests and artistic determination to distill an idea to its essence. His attention to detail creates hidden delights in every inch of his works, and each piece is a testament to his imaginative vision of decor. From textured surfaces that resemble the carapace of a giant creature, to radiant polished metals and glistening modern Boulle marquetry, Boulloud’s cabinets, tables, mirrors, and seating defy genres and arise from a lineage all their own. His work has been featured in publications including Architectural Digest, Surface, and The Wall Street Journal, and in several exhibitions at Twenty First Gallery.

Having begun his artistic career in 1983, French artist François Corbeau is self taught as a sculptor. He is known for his shining metal furniture works wrought from sheets of aluminum, bronze, and tin, which embody a contemporary practice of dinanderie metalwork traditions that date back to medieval Europe. Light becomes an active component of Corbeau’s works, with their gleaming finish evoking a brilliant luminosity and reflecting their surroundings in space. With their large surface areas of shaped metal polished to a high shine acting as mirrors, Corbeau envisions the creation of his pieces as “quantum events,” capable of producing a transformed image of their environment. The reflection of the interiors in which they are placed is cast upon their surfaces, along with the beings that share space with them, giving these furnishings the power of “instant energy exchange,” as the artist describes it. The sculptural inventiveness of his work calls to mind the mirrored works of Anish Kapoor: incongruous, metaphysical objects that excite our visual and spatial awareness. Corbeau’s exquisite solid metal handling graces credenzas, cabinets, semainiers, nightstands, bars, vases, and boxes: objects of irresistible opulence and density that project gossamer filaments of light. In the first two years of his career he won the Prize of the National Commission for UNESCO (1984) and the Florence Gould Award for Sculpture in Monaco (1985) in collaboration with Cardenas. He previously worked with Pierre Staudenmeyer of the legendary contemporary furniture gallery Neotu that operated in Paris between 1984 and 2000 prior to being represented by Twenty First Gallery.

Born in France in 1967, Emmanuel Babled graduated in 1989 from Industrial Design at the European Institute of Design in Milan and established his independent design studio in Milan in 1992, later relocating to Amsterdam in 2010. He began his teaching career in 2000 at the Domus Academy in Milan, and is currently a visiting professor at the Eindhoven Design Academy in the Netherlands. Babled’s limited edition pieces are distinguished by their luxurious materials, clean forms and technical brilliance. Ranging from lighting, rugs, glass tableware, and furniture, his work exemplifies modern Italian design while drawing upon the craftsmanship of older traditions. Selecting the highest quality materials such as Carrara and Nero Marquinia marble, handblown Murano glass, and Sicilian volcanic stone, which have a storied artistic heritage passed down through generations, Babled uses computer technology to achieve the precise and balanced forms that have established his reputation as one of the foremost designers of his generation. Producing limited editions and unique pieces with a rigorous attention to excellence and quality, Babled’s sculptural works play in the space between abstraction and utility. Babled has held solo exhibitions on several continents and his work is found in public and private collections worldwide. In addition to his solo design productions, he has consulted on design, art direction and craftsmanship for a number of businesses, creating work for a host of international companies including Baccarat, Covo, Idee Co. Ltd, Laurent Perrier, Rosenthal and Venini.