Dior, Gucci, Saint Laurent Illustrator Konstantin Kakanias Created First Furnishings Form

PARIS — Famed type illustrator Konstantin Kakanias has introduced his first furnishings assortment, with items making their debut at PAD Paris Artwork + Design, which runs till Sunday.

Kakanias, recognized for his fanciful paintings with Cartier, Dior, and reimagining the Gucci emblem as a snake, amongst alternative high-profile type initiatives, partnered with Athens-based Stefanidou Tsoukala Gallery to develop the items.

“I love art as a useful commodity,” Kakanias instructed WWD. “I love art as a cup, or a pot, or a screen. I love it, and I don’t think it’s lesser. I think it’s wonderful to have the ability to express oneself in many stages and many mediums.”

The prolific artist has made his mark in lots of methods. He began his profession designing materials for Yves Saint Laurent and Christian Lacroix, amongst others; his artwork and sculptures had been exhibited all over the world, and he nonetheless maintains a per month type comic strip web page in Fashion Greece on the behest of his loved mom. And time he has labored on interiors earlier than, at Christian Louboutin’s Vermelho Melides lodge in Portugal, which opened latter spring, it was once his first day developing furniture.

Gallery founder Veta Stefanidou Tsoukala approached him with the theory then the 2 labored in combination on a mural at the island of Ios. The speculation — and the partnership — sparked one thing unutilized for Kakanias.

“It’s a completely new role, new challenge, new opportunity in a way of having a new expression. And I really believe in creating as much as we can, in whatever way we can,” he stated about exploring this unutilized move between the arena of artwork and gadgets.

He introduced his Mrs. Tependris personality, the eccentric type maven that first seemed in 1996 and has since been the topic of 2 books and a movie, alongside for the trip. She’s embedded in marquetry facet tables, and in different places hand painted on a lacquered log cupboard. Kakanias maintains his sense of caprice within the items, with tiny, bronze human ft anchoring the cabinetry.

For wallpaper he regarded to the vegetation in Pedanius Dioscorides’ historic encyclopedia of botany for inspiration, rendered as an “aquatic jungle” with gigantic-ized, hand-painted vegetation in white and gold on a deep blue background. Gigantic magnolias assemble for wall lamps, time undulating mirrors are hand-carved as are chaise lounges with the legs sloping up into serpents. There are textiles, pillows and ceramics, too.

The illustrations from antiquity handover as an access into his charmed global. “The idea is that we enter into their world. It’s something that I find very interesting, because it gives us another state of scale. We can enter into something that we don’t really see a lot. It’s surprising, to me, and also magical and also hopeful.”

In other places he can pay tribute to the later Summer time Olympic Video games in Paris. Mrs. Tependris runs round the town visiting diverse Parisian landmarks, leaping hurdles or sporting the torch, all time in her trademark fabulous type and a couple of elevated tall heels.

Hope carries via with that piece because it harks again to his paintings with the Greek video games, when he was once tasked with making a accumulation for the Athens Olympics in 2004. He notes that the traditional Greeks had a convention referred to as Ekecheiria, or calling a truce to halt wars throughout the Video games to permit preserve passage for athletes and voters.

“It’s an homage to peace,” he stated.

The limited-edition assortment — there are best 5 of each and every piece — took two months to develop. Kakanias sketched his concepts at house in Los Angeles, time Veta and Laura Tsoukala, her daughter who runs the gallery, decided on the works to place into manufacturing. Kakanias next traveled to Greece to paintings with native artisans at the assortment.

“They brought me to the most incredible hidden places of Athens, in basements, behind buildings, up three staircases, to craftspeople who do really meticulous work, from Syria and all across Asia Minor, who have been taught by their grandfather and are very devoted,” he stated. “I’ve never done that. I’ve always been in my studio making drawings. So that was a wonderful change.”

It’s now not exactly true that he’s all the time been in his studio, Kakanias joked. When he was once 22 and dealing for designers together with Saint Laurent, Giorgio Armani or Emmanuel Ungaro, he would comic strip in a pocket book time driving the educate round Paris. “Then I would send them by post. It was very, very old fashioned and very chic,” he stated. “But that was the 1980s.”