When the full moon looks down at us, what does she see? Traditionally: werewolves and witchcraft, insomnia and insanity, all supposedly inspired by her light. So strong are these mythical associations that, on the one hand, they account for the very term “lunacy,” and on the other, the moon’s connection with creativity, which it draws out of human beings even as it stirs tides into the oceans. All of which courses through Charles Baudelaire’s great poem Les Bienfaits de la Lune, in which he describes the moon, “which is caprice itself,” shining through a window upon an infant still in her cradle. What flows from this moment is a prophecy. The child has been granted a heightened sensitivity, and thereby a destiny, in which she will experience pleasures and sufferings alike:
water, clouds, silence and the night; the sea, immense and green; the waters formless and multiform; the place where you shall not be; the lover whom you shall not know; monstrous flowers; perfumes that cause delirium…
When Irene Cattaneo encountered the poem, she shuddered with recognition. She immediately identified with that moonlit child, feeling herself to be a person gifted (cursed?) with similar attributes, “deeply in tune with beauty, mystery, and sorrow,” as she puts it. And yet, in choosing to respond to it through her own creative practice, she showed remarkable strength: it is no small thing, to convey deep emotion through the medium of design. Cattaneo thus read Baudelaire with her eyes wide open, quite aware of the context of his understanding of the moon, which is shot through with an ancient gender politics. For the Greeks, the sun was Apollo and the moon Selene; masculinity was hot and radiant, femininity relegated to its pale reflection. Cattaneo rejects such sexist binaries, as should we all. Even so, she could see herself described in Baudelaire’s haunting lines. In this exhibition, we in turn witness her working through them, tracing the contours where madness and inspiration meet.
The results are impressively “multiform,” incorporating many materials and processes (aluminum, bronze, glass, stone, textile) and also what we might call different aspects, or phases, of Cattaneo’s own expansive sensibility. She has borrowed the title for the show, and many of the pieces on display, directly from Baudelaire’s poem, and some of the works – such as the Monstrous Flower table lamp - seem almost to materialize it, as if a surrealist film were being made of the poem and she was the prop mistress. Lunar imagery also appears explicitly in Nocturnal Caresses, a rounded armchair with a cratered carapace, and The place where you shall not be,a coffee table in onyx, its top partly covered by pulegoso bubble-infused glass, giving it a gibbous aspect.
Despite these direct references, the overall effect of the show is more elusive than allusive, evoking a feeling of dreamlike sensual suspension. In describing the complex emotional affect she has sought in the project, Cattaneo reaches beyond the available vocabulary of English (not surprisingly, for she is impressively cosmopolitan: of Italian heritage, raised in Germany, trained in London, and now exhibiting in Paris), referring both to the Japanese concept of yūgen – wistful and melancholy aesthetic appreciation – and to the German term Sehnsucht, a yearning for something inaccessible, so deep that it feels like an illness or addiction. The moon, as she points out, is an apt symbol for such poignant longing. It is something we can all see on any cloudless night, yet will never reach.
A monumental wall piece in the exhibition takes that word, Sehnsucht, as its title. It is indeed captivating, with macroscopic flower petals executed in a mesmerizing combination of glass techniques – pulegoso and layers of iridescence with an admixture of bronze powder – all with rivulets of silvery mirror running between them. Looking into it, you catch yourself only in glimpses even as you feel reduced in scale, as if you were a bumblebee. It is only one of many floral forms in the show, all communicating the idea of transient beauty, here one day, gone the next, and thereby existing mainly in the domains of anticipation and memory. One group of works have attenuated frames of bronze, somewhat reminiscent of the designs of Diego Giacometti, but tipped here and there with sculpted flowerheads. These pieces share the title Nightbloom, an allusion to plants that blossom only after the sun sets; one that has particularly inspired her is the Epiphyllum oxypetalum or “Queen of the Night,” a cactus that flowers only once a year, under the light of the moon, wilting before the dawn.
As will already be clear, Cattaneo is deeply invested in craft, but here and there she subtly deploys current technology, as well. She has, for example, created 3D scans of flowers at various stages of growth, then meticulously translated these complex shapes into hand-sculpted forms. While these digital inputs are hard to detect – they have been fully submerged, as it were, into the physicality of her objects – they lend the exhibition its strange temporal quality, giving traditional processes (hot glass blowing, lost-wax bronze casting, hand-executed mohair upholstery) the feeling of science fiction. It’s a fusion of the artisanal and the futuristic, which has its own precedent, particular to Paris. For echoes of Art Nouveau are pervasive in Cattaneo’s work. The greatest designers associated with the movement – Aubrey Beardsley, Hector Guimard, René Lalique – gravitated equally to the sinister and the seductive, the exciting and the eerie. They were proposing alternative realities, enthralling, encompassing aesthetic experiences that they famously understood as “total works of art” (Gesamtkunstwerke), existing entirely on their own terms.
Cattaneo has accomplished just this in her inaugural installation here at Gastou, presenting her pieces in the gallery’s cool marble rooms, already akin to a lunar landscape, with theatrical lighting that bestows an evanescent play of light and shadow upon the mise-en-scène. While the objects can be appreciated individually, they achieve a greater potency en masse, rather as plants pollinate one another in a garden. On a deeper level, continuity is established by a consistent methodology of alchemical transformation. Natural forms metamorphosize into artificial ones: the pallid moon into gleaming metal; pliant tendrils into sturdy bronze armatures; flowing water into Murano glass; passing clouds, once memorably described by Cattaneo as “the sky’s thoughts,” into illuminated sconces. Her genius for transmutation is everywhere evident, both in the selection of the various materials and her skillful handling of them. Her works are always evocative of their sources, but never illusionistic; they remain true to the spirit of nature while arriving at an idiosyncratic abstraction that is all her own.
One work in the show, a console entitled Chère Enfant Gâtée (“dear spoiled child,” another quotation from Les Bienfaits de la Lune), stands somewhat apart from the rest, even as it participates in the overall dynamic of visual flow. It takes the form of a knotted ribbon supporting a broad glass top. This counterintuitive arrangement suggests a conjurer’s trick, which can perhaps be interpreted as a metaphor for self-invention. If there is a portrait of Cattaneo in the show, this is surely it; but the impression it conveys is complex. It playfully alludes to her identification with Baudelaire’s imagined little girl, and also, perhaps, with the muses and femmes fatales that have obsessed so many male artists, not least those affiliated with Art Nouveau. At the same time, as a feat of transformation, the object is uncompromising proof of Cattaneo’s artistry, which is anything but childlike. I read it as an allegory for her position, first, as a maker of putatively “ornamental” objects that nonetheless have an undercurrent of conceptual storytelling; and second, as a female designer reacting to stereotypical ideals. As the decorative has itself been so strongly gendered as feminine, historically speaking, these two dialectics are themselves enmeshed with one another. In this one object, it seems to me, she has neatly summarized all her contradictory feelings about all this, and literally tied a bow on top.
What it all adds up to is an exhibition of remarkable sophistication, all the more provocative for being realized in the form of functional objects. Like many of her generational peers, Cattaneo seems to intuitively understand the ongoing radical possibilities of design: to treat it as a vehicle not just of functionality, but also poetic narrative; to articulate the fraught psychological landscape of the home; to animate the latent communicative potential of public space; to get into your head before you are any the wiser. I would argue that this potential no longer exists in the case of an autonomous artwork, if it ever did, for art necessarily stands out against the backdrop of everyday life, rather than actively reshaping it. A chair, table, lamp or mirror, by contrast, can slip quietly into place and cast its wordless spell. Perhaps this is one last reason that Cattaneo recognized herself in Baudelaire’s poem, which, after all, is a description of moonlight creeping noiselessly into a child’s bedroom:
Softly she descended her staircase of clouds and passed without sound through the window glass. Then she stretched herself out over you with the soft tenderness of a mother, and laid her colors upon your face.
It is a loving image, but also an unsettling one, that of an unforced entry into a space of pure innocence. In her absorption and interpretation of this primal scene, Cattaneo takes on multiple guises, adopts multiple perspectives: she is both the little child and the adult that child will eventually become. She is the poet, taking over where Baudelaire left off a century and a half ago. And perhaps she is the moon, too, after and above all, bestowing her illumination upon us, setting our world alight.
By the Light of the Moon
Glenn Adamson
