Arranging Things

Leonard Koren: Nathalie may have a different recollection of this, but I think I met her the first time around 1983, or possibly ‘84, when I came to Milan to see a new friend, Ettore Sottsass. I met Nathalie and George and a few other people who were working with Ettore. And was this pre Memphis?

Nathalie Du Pasquier: No, no, no. It was at the time of Memphis. I think it was also during the furniture fair, actually, because it was the time that we were in a small apartment, and we were doing a big drawing of a city. I think this is when you came.

Leonard: And it was summer. I remember because we—

Nathalie: It was September.

Leonard: Yes. You and I were maybe going to go to the beach, but we didn’t. Instead, I went to a Bob Dylan concert with Barbara and Ettore. So that’s when we met, but when we really connected was Ettore’s 80th birthday party, and it was in a courtyard where Aldo Cibic, the designer, used to live. Something clicked, and mentally we were on the same wavelength with a number of things. I’m not quite sure exactly what all those elements are, but yes, I started following what Nathalie was doing with great interest.

Leonard: I found myself making a certain kind of book in which I would ask myself about an aesthetic issue. I was curious about certain questions, and then I would proceed to make a book about that. The particular issue of this book was, Why are some people able to arrange things in a way that is extremely evocative, emotionally potent, and visually potent, whereas other people try to do it and can’t? I’d been following Nathalie’s work, and I saw she was doing a lot of paintings of arrangements, for want of a better term, paintings of different kinds of objects that were in her studio, so I asked her if she would do this project with me.

Nathalie: I think it was in 2001, and it was a year that a lot of sad things were happening in my family, so I was very happy to have a project to focus on. For almost a year, Leonard would send me sentences describing relationships between objects or between things without telling me that they had to be things from my studio. That was something I decided, because he also sent photos of different things just to give me an idea of something like ‘an important object between two less important things’. It was extremely amusing, and I understood, thanks to these requests by Leonard, that in fact, this is what I had already been doing. I’d never thought of myself like that, you know, I had never thought I was painting still lifes. It’s later that I understood this is what I did.

Leonard: Yeah, I think with the photographs—I understood quite early on, and it was quite clear to me, having published a magazine and art directed it and dealing with artists versus illustrators, that Nathalie was not an illustrator. And so, I wanted to present her with food for the imagination, but not in an offensive way. I didn’t give her precise instructions, but sometimes the photographs were included because I couldn’t describe it that well myself. So that was a kind of auxiliary element to help with my communication to her.

Nathalie: So, I would receive these yellow envelopes where there was the description of the relationship that had to be between the objects and then inside some information, some further information you would provide.

Nathalie: I can show you because Leonard did an exhibition in Brussels at La Loge, which is an ex-Masonic lodge where they organise exhibitions. They did an exhibition and a talk with Leonard that was about five years ago, and I couldn’t be there, but I made a little book for the occasion, one of my little publications where I explained all that and included photos of the paintings that we decided not to put—that you decided not to put in the book.

Nathalie: It was quite physical. Yeah. It was not very much about email.

Leonard: There was an email component in that I was living in San Francisco at the time, and Nathalie is in Milan, so there was a nine-hour time difference. Nathalie would be working all day, and, at the end of the day, she could send me images of what she had worked on. I would see it, and we could discuss it via email because of that time difference.

Nathalie: It was great we had this possibility. For me, it was really the beginning—I’d had the computer for maybe one or two years, so I was not so good at it. I was able to take a photo and put it in the computer. But I was not at all tech.

Nathalie: Yeah, it was ‘organic and manufactured’.

Leonard: It surprised me too. I was really enchanted with the way it happened. When information goes from one mind to another mind, the way it gets transformed.

Nathalie: That was super interesting.

Leonard: It’s beautiful.

Leonard: I was surprised by most of them. I had no idea, and it was like, okay, here’s my wish, and I threw it into the ocean. Then it comes back onto the shore. It was like that.

Nathalie: I very much like to have a starting point for doing something. Some people don’t like to be told what to do, but, to me, to have a starting point was really interesting. I also immediately understood I wanted to put very personal things in the compositions. One has a photo of George, and others have things that I like, books that I like.

Nathalie: Yeah, this was a very big book painting. This book was by a friend of mine, a poet who had died some years before. I love his poems, so this is also an homage to him in a way. You know, I was really able to put very personal things because they were also fitting.

Leonard: When I look at it right now, it’s very poignant, actually. I don’t know, it’s—

Nathalie: Glue Leaning on Soap.

Leonard: You see, Nathalie has this very practical streak too, which is good, you know, I think it’s something we share. We could both operate in that mode of being very down to earth and straightforward. Yet that level has a lot of resonance; on the one hand, it’s very practical and straightforward. On the other hand, it’s the poetry of life.

Leonard: Well, ha, yeah, that’s my delusion. I mean, that’s the hope of all of us who create things. In order to have the energy and the confidence to actually do something, you have to believe that it will have value and work in the world. That’s not always the case for me, but that’s—

Nathalie: But it has for you. It has value for you, which is the main thing, like for me, this is the only drive I have.

Leonard: And the other thing is that—I know it seems very much for Nathalie and for me, too—I can’t get to point C without going through point B, which means that I have had to do the books I’ve done in the order I’ve done them and the way I’ve done them to get where I am now. And I don’t understand how that works or why it works, but that’s just the way it is.

Leonard: I was surprised, actually.

Nathalie: Because I don’t like to do things smaller than what they are. So, if I have to do a chair, it has to be in the scale of the chair. This is why some are small, because they are made of small objects. If there are some bigger things, like the chairs, then there are bigger paintings.

Leonard: Interesting, ah, I should have said I needed large animals.

Leonard: Yes! An elephant.

Nathalie: Everything is real. Everything is real. I don’t invent anything. I installed the set in front of me.

Leonard: She was a realist then.

Nathalie: Yeah, though not so many flowers because I am more into objects, but here there are these little spring things which I like.

Nathalie: Yes, and I can show you some of the props if you like.

Leonard: Oh, this one [Figure XV, pg. 51], this one we have at our house, at our apartment.

Nathalie: But this is on paper?

Leonard: No, it’s on canvas. And you know what? I have to say, all the paintings are much more beautiful in real life than the way they are reproduced. This painting is so beautiful in real life, I can’t tell you. Nathalie is an amazing colourist, and it’s something that you don’t think of at first, but then when you actually see the paintings, you realise that there’s a magical thing that she does with colour, that it’s a whole other level. So, we’re talking about the imagery here, we’re talking about the objects, but this colour, it’s not really a bluish—it’s really kind of a grey and a very special grey in real life.

The other day I saw this painting [Figure XI, pg. 43] for the first—I’d say it’s for the first time—Nathalie says I’ve seen it before, the one with the objects in the glass jar. When Nathalie shows you this real painting—look at the colours of the actual painting. I mean, it’s just so soothing.

Nathalie: No, I don’t like to do things smaller, but I like to do them bigger because it allows me to be more detailed. I can transform what I see into a sign, which you can’t do if it is very small. I can’t, at least.

Nathalie: No, no title.

Leonard: No, that would make them quote-unquote Works of Art. You know, and then it’s a whole other level. I think I addressed that in the Arranging Things book. You’d have to—I wanted them to look like arrangements of things done by an artist, but not—

Nathalie: But not art pieces.

Leonard: Not art pieces in the normal context that we think of as art pieces.

Nathalie: No, I like them all actually. Or this one [Figure VIII, pg. 37], I like it because there is a photo of George. This is a photo, you know, for—

Nathalie: Yeah, and then where I have coloured the red. I think it was taken in ‘81 or so, and then with Morgan, George’s son, we were colouring them. I very much liked this little image. I think it was ‘arranged as a temple’.

Leonard: Yeah, I might have used the word shrine.

Nathalie: Yeah, yeah, I think that was the word you used.

Nathalie: Dario Villa is a great poet.

Nathalie: No, I don’t have a specific poem, but I did a book with him, before he passed away, with the black and white ink drawings. I like his work, and he was also a good friend.

He passed away in ‘96, but George designed the cover of this book for Feltrinelli, which is an Italian editor. All his work was collected, and this was the anthology.

Leonard: While I was working on this book, I ran into this flower shop in Vienna that I really liked because it was sort of the best business that I’d ever encountered, in the sense that it was very idealistic. They catered to the soul of their customers, you know, their emotional needs. They worked very hard, and they were also artistically very inventive, and they arranged things very interestingly. So, I spent time with them on a book, but other than that, I had satisfied my curiosity about the mechanics of arranging things with this, and so I moved on to other ideas. You know, my most popular book is a book called Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers, and people often think, Oh, you must live a wabi-sabi life. And, you know. No, not really. I mean, obviously everything that we do as creators is part of who we are or some reference to who we are. But, no, I’m not obsessive about ideas that I’ve done in the past.

Leonard: Exactly.

Leonard: Yeah. Somebody I actually became friends with, she’s a computer engineer who started a company and sold it handsomely to Google. It’s now part of the infrastructure of the Internet. And she wrote and told me that she uses the interpretations to see if she agrees with them or not. She’s very involved with experience design, which is a completely different kind of design. So, she uses it as a paradigm in a different context. Does that answer your question?

Leonard: She is one of these people. She said, I don’t agree with all of your interpretations, but that’s good, because just the paradigm made me think of the way in which we interpret things and how everybody’s interpretation is different and just how various the interpretations could be. You know, my books are a little bit dogmatic in a sense, but they’re meant as kind of springboard for other people.

Nathalie: It’s a dogma in order for other people to negate it, and this is interesting. I mean, I think this should be—a lot of dogmatic things are interesting for that.

Leonard: When I used to read a book, I would have a dialogue with the author: Oh, no, I don’t agree with that. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. In fact, I had a friend who used to write notes. Every book he has in his bookshelf is like a running dialogue in the margins with the author of the book.

Nathalie: We can look, and I think I have some of the works on paper as well.