Béatrice Saint-Laurent has the kind of intellectual sex appeal Americans would find terribly French. Her life – which includes a nearly unheard of departure from the French civil service’s gilded upper spheres where she worked in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs – has been marked by a passion for collecting and rarity. The smouldering Parisian semiotician is as cosy with Ferdinand de Saussure as she is with Yves Saint-Laurent which poses an embarrassingly luxurious question: which talent to exploit in a fabulous new Northern Marais gallery designed by Noé Duchaufour-Lawrance with a wrap-around vortex in Corian? The answer seems to be a focus on tightly edited lifestyle collections, featuring hand-painted python bags, hybridized polystyrene/porcelain housewares by Djim Berger, and a somewhat frightening brute-metal ‘lovers’ chair’ with a built-in echo chamber by Miami/Basel’s ‘Designer of the Future’, Nacho Carbonell. If you’re expecting prices as astronomical as the gathered talent you might want to slip on your readers and take a look at that tag: smaller pieces start at around 100€.
23 rue Charlot, 3rd. 01 44 78 94 14. Tue-Sat, 11am-7pm.
www.galeriebsl.com/
