Savoir-faire
“The know-how of craftsmanship is at its best when serving the imaginary. When the might of the hand is combined to the might of the mind, the magic is revealed. Beauty only results from this encounter.” – India Mahdavi.
India Mahdavi brings know-hows back to their primal function: to reveal the beauty of a material, embellished by the craftsman, serving a certain vision, a sharp standpoint.
Whether it is rattan, lacquer, ceramic, each object, each piece of furniture designed by India Mahdavi demonstrates this attachment to the transformation of a drawing into a function, and even further, to a shared emotion. Nothing is overly ornated nor fussy. In the Murano lamps, Mongolian cashmere plaids and Bohemian glasses, the cosmopolitan feel transcends know-hows in a polychrome and polyglot realm.
In the asymmetricity, the roundness and the graphic oppositions, know-hows revere the beauty of imperfection. India Mahdavi, who keeps a copy of the ‘wabi-sabi’ on her bedside table, performs this essential practice in the cutting of a lacquer tray, the assembly of rattan stalks in the shape of a sun, or the firing of ceramics through the emblematic bishop collection.
At India Mahdavi’s, know-hows revere an atypical beauty, a taste that combines extravagance and demand, humility and audacity, far from uniformity and standards. It relates to the beauty of the heart, of hospitality, of a warm house in which India Mahdavi lets in colour and light with essential and voluptuous forms.