Mathieu Lehanneur, optimistic designer

Mathieu Lehanneur, designer. What more can I say?

I was born in 1974 and spent many years (seven) at ENSCI-Les Ateliers (National School of Industrial Creation). I believe I hold the record for the longest duration at that school. I graduated in 2001 with a diploma project focused on drug design. The day after, I became independent.

It happened because during my studies (among other things to support myself), I tested drugs before they hit the market. That’s when I realized how, beyond the active ingredient of the drug, there is a whole relational aspect between the patient, like you and me, and a blister pack of medication. The relationship that should be established between this somewhat special object and us depends on its appearance, the message it conveys, but is not considered in treatments. The question went beyond the idea of packaging: it was really about shaping the active ingredient.

It was psychologically indispensable! I was born into a large, even very large family, so I didn’t want to join a group, agency, or any company. That was the first reason for being independent. The second reason is that I was already aware that the best way to progress was to gradually eliminate all the intermediaries between an idea, an initial intention, an intuition, and its realization. I was able to implement this idea only recently. After leaving school, my studio was my room. I had no personal fortune, no network. But the idea was already there!

It didn’t happen all at once. I don’t feel a wave that changes everything, like a huge springboard. There was a succession of things. The diploma project entered the MoMA collections. This project led me to question the scientific world: how can we integrate scientific knowledge or techniques into everyday life? I had the carte blanche from VIA (Innovation in Furniture Valorization, a key player in promoting design in France, where the greatest designers, from Andrée Putman to Philippe Starck, have exhibited), and then I developed an air purifier project with a scientist… It was a big staircase that we climbed.

That’s the most recent step, indeed. As we mentioned earlier, I had in mind to try to gradually eliminate all intermediaries. We initiated this process five or six years ago, with the ultimate goal of controlling the entire chain, from the initial intention to realization. For this, we needed to move to a different kind of space: so, we came here, to Ivry, in September 2023, to create this factory where the initial design, sketches, images, adjustments, designs, prototypes, tests, component assembly, packaging, and shipments are entirely managed.

I don’t know, and I really never ask myself that question (Laughs)! Indeed, there are guiding principles. My primary interest is the human being, how we breathe, perceive, believe, what makes us anxious, how we rejoice, sleep, etc. That’s always the starting point. Then, there are paths that find solutions through functional, utilitarian responses. Others that may be more spiritual, transcendent, with functions that are sometimes less obvious. The means to achieve them are materials and processes. Yes, there are many projects that we manage and develop with expert craftsmen because they require specific techniques. However, as you pointed out, we can use advanced techniques at the same time and sometimes on the same projects. There was a project for which we had satellite photos taken, used for an enameled piece by a ceramist. So, we started with today’s most advanced, sophisticated, and expensive technologies to arrive at the final form through the most ancient process: ceramics. Let’s clarify that there is no hierarchy.

My work is interested in the present, works for the present. And then, who am I to assert today that I will design for the future? In the future, there will be other designers, and the world will have changed. The air we breathe will have changed, and they will be more capable of providing answers. It is true that sometimes my work is perceived as futuristic, but I think it’s because we consume so much nostalgia that the signs of the present appear as the future.

I think so. I say “I think” because I have no certainties. Let’s say that I compare all my creations to a family: in a family, brothers and sisters are not the same. Sometimes, they don’t even look alike that much. But there’s a “something,” not always easy to explain. A way of speaking, moving, looking, thinking. It’s the common DNA, what creates the guiding line! What interests me is to keep adding more children to this family to strengthen it. My objects come from very different techniques, with different materials, and sometimes have very different shapes on different scales. Nevertheless, at least I hope so, they talk to each other, they respond to each other. The idea of the space we inaugurated in New York follows this idea: a large apartment arranged as one room, not to create a total look but to show that we have created different things at various times that can still resonate with each other. That’s where one plus one makes a little more than two.

If I had to choose one, it would probably be the air purifier. It was the first project that was truly commercialized, and it was a great success. Yet, the initial intention was quite radical: creating an object designed to take care of the air we breathe, which is both invisible by nature and a part of us. This project dealt with a problem, indoor air pollution, of which we were not even truly aware. So, no one really understood the ins and outs of it because we couldn’t feel it, we couldn’t see it. And yet, the purifier was quite successful. It marked an important moment for me.

Oh, no! There aren’t that many pieces of my creation. Some, but they were mostly wanted by my wife. There are quite a few objects. I buy a lot of things at auctions, some signed, but very often others not signed and whose origin is not very well known: somewhat strange, somewhat vernacular objects. You might say I don’t like what I do, but it’s more like the musician who comes home in the evening and doesn’t listen to his own music, the writer who doesn’t read his own book. It’s normal. I spend my life with my objects, so I spend the night with others.