"Cyril Maisonnave : Designer Tricoteur" - Palace Scope

With his smart elf-like demeanor, Cyril Maisonnave instantly immerses you in joyful poetry.

In Paris, at the Cristal Room Baccarat and at Amelie, Maison d'art, in Nantes, La Ciotat, or Lisbon, his treasures enchant salons and galleries.

But how did he become a knitting designer, creator of metal knitted cutlery that seems to have no other purpose than to be beautiful? Forks, spoons, knives that, when held, one is surprised to find so flexible, so soft? His cat Knitting curled up on the couch, he begins his story: after the divorce, around 7-8 years old, he went to live with his grandparents, Dédé and Dédette. When she was very young, during the Charleston era, Dédette was a embroiderer in a workshop where they sewed the dresses for the Alcazar, including those of Mistinguett. However, in this very simple environment, if he said he wanted to work in fashion, Cyril knew he would be told: "Choose a real job instead." He followed six years of cooking, pastry, and military service. Then he became a salesman on Boulevard Saint-Germain to finance his dream. Bad luck: the directors of the fashion school he had chosen ran away with the money...

Luck: his place awaits him at the Atelier Chardon Savard. When creating his collection in his third year, he desired textures softer than his grandmother's linen sheets, so the director sent him to learn knitting with Isabelle Caltot.

He remembers arriving at her fabulous house, with walls covered in shelves filled with threads of all colors and materials...

He becomes a knitwear designer. Cyrille Chardon and Dominique Savard then propose to him: "If you want, we'll buy the machines, open a knitting workshop, and you'll be the teacher." He has fantastic students, but more than the clothes, he is interested in textile research. He tries other materials, such as copper wire.

From one thing to another, he meets Marie-Hélène Soyer, a metal enamel artist. She is preparing for the Révélations exhibition. He knits her 365 stylized tree leaves in nichrome wire, which she then enamels. Installed on piano wires, with the shadows cast by the Grand Palais skylight, they make a great impression. Marie-Hélène collects wooden spoons. To thank her, he knits one for her in steel wire. She visits a folk art museum in Burgundy, and he accompanies her. There, he reflects on the fate of the wonderful silver housewives fallen into disuse. When Covid arrives, he ponders: "If tomorrow there are only a few survivors on Earth, what will remain of us in 300 years? Everyone uses cutlery. We could find them in fields, entwined with barbed wire, animal hairs, or trapped in rocks at the bottom of the oceans." This is the story he tells: that of rediscovered cutlery, as if from the Titanic.

When he's not teaching knitting at Lisaa in Nantes or enhancing opera costumes, he creates artifacts from scratch. He mixes stainless steel, steel, copper, bronze, brass, nichrome, with silk threads, seed beads picked from Dédette's embroiderer's box, with pearl threads recovered from brocades. He dips them in alum to coat them with crystals, in very salty water so they oxidize until verdigris, or in kombucha. He buries them, unearths them, inserts roots, the orange thread from a child's fishing net, red from the rhubarb he just made a crumble with. He opens up universes. And the minds to imagination.

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