Paul Evans Iron Coffee Table

Black coffee table in steel and adroise by Paul Evans.

A leader in the American Studio Furniture movement, Evans' work exhibits a singular aesthetic sense, as well as a seemingly contradictory appreciation for both “folk art” forms and new materials and technologies. He embodies modernity in the United States since the 1960s with an innovative and experimental approach to metal, the American designer Paul Evans has long remained anonymous, unknown in Europe. It was the Galeriste Patrick Fourtin who devoted his first exhibition to him in 2004 in France. Today collectors of contemporary art are snapping up his pieces, Lenny Kravitz and Elton John are part of the fan club. At the age of 24, after studying sculptor and goldsmithing, he set down his suitcases in New Hope, Pennsylvania; He will stand out by creating furniture; lamps, tables, sideboards, cabinets like sculptures, he works with copper, tin, bronze, silver, gold and steel.

The fusion of metals gives way to hard, textured surfaces that have a patina of paint and acid. In 1964, his collaboration with the Directional publishing house launched a new phase in his career; the sculptor becomes a designer, Paul Evans is unclassifiable, his creations fascinate by their artistic force and their sophisticated beauty.

Evans' main material was metal, not wood, which was favored by his fellow studio designers and Bucks County, Pa., Neighbors George Nakashima and Philip Lloyd Powell. He trained in metallurgy and studied at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, the famous melting pot of modern design and art in the suburbs of Detroit. Early in his career, Evans also worked at Sturbridge Village, a historic Massachusetts 'living museum', where he demonstrated as a costumed silversmith. Evans' early works unite these influences. The pieces that made its reputation are known as “sculpted face” cabinets: wooden boxes covered with box-shaped frames in high relief patinated steel arranged in a grid pattern. Each frame contains a metal emblem, or glyph, and the effect is that of a muscular quilt.

Evans' later work falls into three distinct style groups. His sculpted bronze pieces, begun in the mid-1960s, show Evans at his most expressive. He used a technique in which the resin is shaped by hand and then sprayed with a metallic coating, allowing an artistic shade in the making of chairs, tables and cabinets. Later in the decade and into the 1970s, Evans produced his Argente series: consoles and other forms of furniture that feature aluminum and metal surfaces infused with pigments welded together in abstract organic shapes and patterns. high tech 'from the late 1970s. Evans constructed square shapes and confronted them with irregular mosaic patterns that mixed rectangular plates of chrome steel, bronze or burl veneer.

These, like all Paul Evans designs, are both useful and eye-catching. But their appeal has another, more visceral quality: these pieces have clearly been touched by the hand of an artist.