Manufacture de Boucleries

Throughout his life, Emile Hermès, that inveterate collector, amassed a magnificent ensemble of objects and books devoted to the equestrian arts. Among the works acquired on his travels, these catalogues advertise the range of products made by a 19th-century harness buckle factory. Memory is central to the work of Italian-born designer, artist, illustrator and author Gianpaolo Pagni, an adoptive Parisian who collaborates with numerous French and international publications including Le Monde, La Stampa and the Washington Post. Pagni creates stamped designs in a bewildering array of forms, using them to cover and transfigure the pages of more prosaic documents – magazines or schoolbooks –, generating mysterious signs and symbols. Accumulation and repetition create an intimate, poetic archaeology all their own. The bits and stirrups, curb chains, hame chains and stable rings featured in the album spring to life under Pagni’s magical touch, forging a new link between his work and the house of Hermès.