Guillaume Bloget, Être là

From 15 February to 23 June 2024, the Cité du design in Saint-Étienne presents the work of Guillaume Bloget, the second guest designer in the Présent >< Futur cycle. Être là is his first solo exhibition. It reveals his sensitive, demanding practice of design, always focused on the true expression of the object.

The aim of the Présent >< Futur cycle is to encourage young creative talent and therefore to contribute to the forging of new definitions for design. In this second opus, we discover the sensitive, demanding and cross-cutting design practice of Guillaume Bloget, in an impeccably staged setting. Inspired by American artist Robert Irwin’s installation Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue, this central feature juxtaposes around forty different projects, prototypes, studies, publications and architectural models. As the visitor’s angle of view changes, the objects are superposed and connections implying a certain complicity between them emerge. A personal universe can be seen taking shape: the lines are clean, the shapes are essential, virtually archetypal. «Être là» means Being There, asserting a presence, but especially not ducking reality and its constraints. Dodging none of our contemporary challenges. Defining a clear position. All of these objects are born of research conducted on the basis of an in-depth understanding of tools and materials and a sustained interest in craft and industrial know-how. What Guillaume Bloget calls «observation of the environment» defines his intuitive method of probing uses deeply rooted in everyday life and making his proposed upgrades of them in the most relevant way possible. Design is about listening, being attentive to others. The two ongoing projects with the Verrerie de Saint-Just glassworks are symptomatic of a quality of exchange, one which carries in it a real formal potential that is open to new imaginative concepts.

Laurence Salmon, Director of the design dissemination department

The guest designer

Guillaume Bloget
Seeking the essence of the object

From 15 February to 23 June 2024, the Cité du design in Saint-Étienne presents the work of Guillaume Bloget, the second guest designer in the Présent >< Futur cycle. Être là is his first solo exhibition. It reveals his sensitive, demanding practice of design, always focused on the true expression of the object. Guillaume Bloget takes up residence at the Cité du design. At the age of 32, his quest - his fantasy almost - for an ideal, that of seeking out raison d’être of objects is the guiding force behind his practice as a designer and his collaboration with producers of objects, whether industrial manufacturers or craftspeople.

Guillaume Bloget is an independent designer based in Paris. A graduate of ENSCI-Les Ateliers, during his course he trained in woodworking with artist Nicolas Cesbron and industrial design with designer Marc Berthier. The sensitive attention he pays to materials, to the history of technical know-how and the evolution of uses form the basis of his approach.

He has been documenting his subjects in books since 2016, as part of a collective, Les Collections Typologie, which explores the history and manufacturing of everyday objects, and which was the subject of an exhibition at the Vitra Design Museum in Germany in 2020.

After beginning his career working with architects Dominique Perrault and Jacques Ferrier on furniture, object and interior design projects, Guillaume Bloget set up his own industrial design studio in 2018. The same year, he won the GIL prize awarded by the Syndicat des Luminaires for his Type lamp design. He defines himself as a specialist in projects, open to any type of experimentation, as he has proved with residencies at the Fondation Hermès Académie des savoir-faire, the Association Rhizome and CERCCO at HEAD in Geneva.

His design work is about finding optimum solutions: syntheses between formal simplicity, economical use of materials and the potential for different uses. His objects have a singular, authentic quality that embodies that quest for the essential. He develops this approach in collaborations with firms in the industrial and artisan sectors. His name is associated with the Fondation Hermès, the Seikado art gallery (Japan), with Richard Orfèvre as well as design editors like Ligne Roset, Nemo Lighting (Italy) and Oros.

When I design an object, I am not trying to express something singular. I am just looking for a true expression of the object, of its nature. I think about the meaning of the action that it will condition and I try to translate that into the form.