Low-edged chair | The Press

The multidisciplinary artist Jeremy Le Chatelier is one of those who likes to wander, to let himself be carried away by his desires, sometimes against the tide of the times. His Hublot chair – dreamed of over the water – reflects his diverse inclinations. A personal point of view defying domestic conventions and paving the way for a poetic reading of the objects that mark our daily lives.

Sometimes it only takes a few things to transport yourself elsewhere. A deckchair, with its seat almost at ground level and its canvas floating in the air, can serve this beautiful purpose. It doesn’t matter, often, the environment and even the season where we curl up there with our eyes closed.

By a fortunate combination of circumstances, it was at the Old Port of Montreal, opposite the Bota Bota spa, that Jeremy Le Chatelier unveiled, last March at the Complètement Design show, the Hublot chair, evoking this classic of the shores.

This singular object, made up of two panels pierced by a vast open circle on a flexible seat, appears both as a piece of furniture and a work of art. “This project, associating the function of the chair with a more sculptural aspect of it, summarizes the two approaches that I like to explore through my artistic practice,” observes Jeremy Le Chatelier, who also oversees the creative work at Authentik lighting.

Born in Costa Rica to a French father and a Swiss mother working in the tourism field, Jeremy traveled widely before undertaking studies in graphic design at UQAM, then gravitating between rigorous design projects and others infinitely more free. Like the exhibition Sienna mounted in 2022 at the Sutton School of Art, mixing paintings and sculptures made using materials saved from recycling centers and construction sites.

Lines on the horizon

The idea for the Hublot chair emerged from his thoughts during family stays on the Île de Ré and in Saint-Tropez, in France. “The shape and gesture of the Hublot chair were greatly inspired by these trips to the sea, the sailboats and the landscapes admired through a porthole, but also the codes of modernist architecture,” he confides.

The result of these formal investigations is a chair with a frame offered in three distinct materials, as for the Maison des Three little pigs, a tale associated with these extraordinary meetings by the young artist with unbridled fantasy. The raw materials of choice for the design here being aluminum, wood and concrete with a marked identity and durable character. The basic structure of the seats is assembled and disassembled using six screws, while the seat in cotton canvas, leather or burlap is interchangeable over time and as desired. Jeremy is already collaborating with other artists to expand his collection.

He imagines this piece of furniture indifferently in “mid-century modern” style homes or in more contemporary lofts, preferably on a podium. If he could transpose his chair into an emblematic Montreal building, he would do so without a shadow of hesitation at Habitat 67, in front of which he spent long hours surfing.

“Habitat 67, with its very geometric architecture and its view of the river, would really be the perfect setting for this chair. The formal codes with its geometric compositions and its play on volumes are the same,” he notes. His beech Hublot chair will appear in the catalog of the MAC Spring auction, the evening event of which will be held on May 17, which will further elevate it to the rank of a useful work.

Visit Jeremy Le Chatelier’s website