The elegant five-storey townhouse at 8 Avenue Matignon in Paris has been occupied by many acclaimed galleries, most recently Perrotin. But this season, the building relaunches under the stewardship of longtime tenants Tom-David Bastok and Dylan Lessel. Their exhibition Eden is the first to premiere at the renamed Bastok Lessel, celebrating the work of artist-architect Jean-Guillaume Mathiaut in an artfully panelled space that highlights the collection’s sensuality and warmth.

Mathiaut spent his youth immersed in the forest of Fontainebleau, south of Paris, and devoted his practice to arboreal shapes and rich wood grain. His talent for repurposing fossilised tree trunks, shedded bark, and fallen branches has given a second life to natural materials most people would step over. In the hands of Mathiaut, a devotee of Constantin Brancusi, Isamu Noguchi and tribal art from Africa and Asia, they become ‘landscape furniture’, collectable pieces beloved for their raw authenticity.

Here in France, they decorate four floors of the reimagined gallery.

As visitors explore the spaces, they can admire faceted benches and seemingly primitive sculptures in handcrafted bookcases. His oak ‘Throne’ chairs look majestic yet unforgiving, while ‘Totem’ and ‘Fetish’ chairs look almost human. The top floor of the show is structured as a treehouse or ‘Cabane’, with views over the Jardins des Champs-Élysées.

Jean-Guillaume Mathiaut: Eden runs at Bastok Lessel until 13 July 2024.

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