HSTI - TWENTY FIRST GALLERY

He started with a booth in the world’s perhaps most famous flea market, the Parisian Marché aux Puces de Saint-Ouen. “But mine was the smallest corner in the entire antiques district, Paul Bert Serpette,” he jokes. Now, Renaud Vuaillat has a super-contemporary gallery in New York’s TriBeCa. For his Twenty First Gallery, he chooses "collectible design of the century"—tables, mirrors, furniture, objects, tapestries—all conceived and crafted in Europe, which he sells in America and around the world. “I don’t like to talk about designers in my case, but rather about true artists,” he explains. “Because what interests and fascinates me is the artistic spirit, the gesture, the research. This can be seen, for example, in the works of the young Polish designer Marcin Rusak). His Flora Cabinets and Flora Coffee Tables, often custom-made, are made of real leaves and petals, dried and immersed in resin. Marcin grew up among the greenhouses of his family’s former nurseries, and his work explores impermanence and decay. It’s a particular technique with a painterly effect: these are poetic pieces, sometimes melancholic, but a kind of melancholy I appreciate, reminiscent of 17th-century still life...