Guy Meldem was born on a farm in Apples in 1980. Today, he is by turns an artist, sculptor, graphic designer and illustrator, singer, beat maker and musician, furniture maker and magician,  
graphic designer and illustrator, singer, beat maker and musician, furniture maker and magician.  

Guy Meldem is unique and multifaceted. A tinkerer with paradoxes, a jack-of-all-trades, like a farmer who knows how to hunt without his cat, a designer who plays with the DNA of our industrial and cultural heritage, a neo-historian who seeks singularity in what already exists. He is the creator, the preserver, the transformer, the concealer and the revealer. Like Shiva, he's got his boots on. 

The Meubles Meldem project is a view through a critical magnifying glass that revisits the history of furniture design in a way similar to the history of this absurd socio-economic world. In this world,  
languages and typologies of form, often at cross-purposes, crash into each other like a slang of a community distinguished by its mixed culture, by the mash-up of ideas, by the system D. It's a surreal but radical way of doing things, reminiscent of a mix between Brutalism and Art Brut with a touch of Gangnam style... This aesthetic remains functional and driven by an ethos that emphasises accessibility, reproducibility and recycled materials. It's a collection of comfortable objects, thought out down to the smallest detail. It's at this point that you realise that it's not just about taking the piss, but about humour and art. Admittedly bordering on cynicism, the result is both joy and anguish. Lying on your Daybed, you feel entitled to talk to your friends about a cataclysmic future. There's a warm-cold nostalgia that emanates from it, an old-fashioned patina that sometimes suggests a return to an Art and Craft philosophy, sometimes a residue from a crash test. The dialogue with the space that will host one of these pieces of furniture will reveal an acid political tension.

It was against this backdrop that Mathieu Winkler invited the artist to collaborate with Moyard SA.

By opening up the workshops and giving access to materials of a more noble register, the exercise presented in this exhibition is a laboratory phase, the possibility of seeking the extreme, of making this material and formal tension even more violent and perverse. It's a crash-test phase that offers us unique answers. In this collage of styles and ideas, an amalgam of references, Meubles Meldem and Moyard have seized an opportunity to use design to address the issues of economy of means, ecology and sustainability, which are increasingly important criteria for choice in Switzerland and elsewhere...

Let's take a diversion to India. In 2014, Chandigarh Furniture, a book co-published by Guy Meldem and the Maximage collective, took an offbeat look at the modernist ideal of the Indian city transformed by  
Le Corbusier. The book focuses on the ambiguity of the modifications made to the furniture of the ideal city by the local population. A Système D that goes straight to the point, a visual hullabaloo that disturbs the idea of a piece of furniture that has now become an icon of twentieth-century design.  

From Chandigarh, we return to Amsterdam to talk about the work of Droog Design. During the Salone del Mobile di Milano in 1993, the duo Gijs Bakker and Renny Ramakers presented a selection of sober objects with industrial finishes and found objects. The presentation was entitled ‘Droog Design’, because of the simplicity and ‘dry’ humour of the objects. Here we find design that questions the industrialisation of furniture, all-electronics, plastic and programmed obsolescence. It's also a half-disguised tribute to the famous Dutch designer Gerrit Rietveld.

But when we talk about Milano, we have to pay tribute to the maestro Enzo Mari, the rebel who embodied a vision of collaborative and ecological design well before its time. He was a self-taught designer, inspired by the Marxist currents of his time and the various waves of Italian workers' movements such as Autonomia Operaia. At a time when industrial design was booming, he constantly sought to involve people in their daily lives.  

In 1974, Enzo Mari caused a scandal with his exhibition Proposta per autoprogettazione, a veritable manifesto aimed at revolutionising the world of distribution. This time, the plans for an entire collection of furniture - chair, table, desk - were supplied free of charge: the idea was that anyone could make it themselves with a minimum of tools (hammer, saw, nails and glue), to regain a little power over their domestic life and dignity in everyday life. The simplicity of the construction system gave users the freedom to modify the original plans as they wished, and Enzo Mari encouraged this approach by asking individuals to send him comments and photographs of the furniture, as a foretaste of the posts that abound today on social networks... Autoprogettazione thus proposed to establish a new, more direct relationship between the designer and the buyer and to democratise design by bypassing the various players in industry and distribution. Enzo Mari's aim was to give users a degree of control over the design of their environment.  

‘My objects are quite close to brutalism. The honest and visible use of materials is an important part of the idea behind my furniture. The idea of being radical and straightforward, showing things as they are and not hiding construction solutions - that appeals to me and I share that way of thinking.’

‘I change fields, but my way of thinking and approaching design remains the same. That's why it doesn't make much difference to me if I'm making music, designing a poster, designing sets or making a chair. There are a lot of analogies.‘

 ‘For me, the ‘Meldem Furniture’ collection was all about being efficient, inexpensive, quick and functional. Even so, I like to incorporate unnecessary things, like pictures or small decorations. If I can find a way of doing it without it being too expensive, I like to complicate it, because I don't think less is more. I'm not looking for minimalism.‘

Production 

Each piece of Meldem furniture is made to order, produced in unlimited numbers, dated and signed.  
The production line is designed to allow the rapid manufacture of furniture on demand in order to optimise costs and avoid waste by reducing stocks to a minimum. Everything is manufactured locally in Apples and Lausanne by Meubles Meldem. Meubles Meldem wants to be paid fairly and also wants furniture to be sold at a price most people can afford. These objectives are achieved by reducing the time taken to build furniture, limiting the range of materials used and using recycled materials wherever possible. Meldem Furniture believes that the economics of the art world are a neo-liberal nightmare, and this project is Guy Meldem's way out.

Materials & sustainability

All furniture is built with a solid, durable structure, but surfaces are deliberately designed to age, sometimes rapidly: Steel rusts, wood yellows, paper and foam slowly degrade. Most of the materials are untreated and no varnish has been applied. The pieces are therefore not suitable for outdoor use.

Recycled, fair trade, biodegradable and non-chemical materials are always preferred. For example, paint and glue are used as little as possible.

Meldem furniture is easy to repair.