Is it art, is it sculpture or is it furniture? Or is it just a pure flight of the imagination? Michel Froment’s work can be sat on, sat at, lit up or just looked at. It defies description. It could be space age or just spaced out. Whatever it is or does or however you use it or display it, it will never fail to garner a reaction; whether that is a smile, a guffaw, admiration or an exclamation: “That is mad!”
And once you’ve seen it, it’s very difficult to get his work out of your head. The alien-like sculptures with eyes, the lunar module-inspired chairs and desk and the lamp that looks like a fried egg will be seared into your memory. The fried egg lamp looks so realistic that when I touched it I half expected it to feel like a fried egg. It wasn’t far off and it isn’t far off from a fried egg in the way that it is made either. It is cooked. Yes, cooked. In a paella dish. But that’s only because a conventional frying pan is too small.
All Michel’s pieces are made from a plastic powder which he cooks, using different techniques to achieve different finishes. To achieve a shiny surface, he pours cold water over the cooking plastic to stop the cooking process and to achieve a velvet-looking surface he adds grains of plastic powder to the surface.
The method of making his furniture, lights and sculptures, may be unusual but it is the strangeness and playfulness of his work that is truly original. Michel says his pieces are expressions of his personality and his unbridled creativity. That is the joy of his work: it is unbridled – flights of fancy taken into the stratosphere.
Michel creates his work in his gallery in Montelimar in the south of France and it is already becoming noticed in France with pieces owned by fashion designer Pierre Cardin and featured in the Michelin-starred Restaurant Tetedoie in Lyons. He exhibited his work for the first time in the UK last month at Tent London 2011. Maybe his next visit should be at an art show.
