Flowering of an idea

There was a meeting of minds when French artist Alexandre Benjamin Navet was asked to decorate the boutiques of Van Cleef & Arpels.

Alexandre Benjamin Navet in his studio

The floral heritage of the Paris-based jewellery house Van Cleef & Arpels has been the inspiration behind a new artistic collaboration for its boutiques around the world. The French designer and artist Alexandre Benjamin Navet was tapped by Van Cleef & Arpels after he won the grand prize at the Design Parade Toulon, an annual interior design festival in 2017, to design the facades and interiors of flagship boutiques around the world in his signature naïve style of painting.

Navet is known for his brightly coloured work in textiles, watercolours and oil pastels (his favourite medium), and has previously collaborated with Hermès, Baccarat and the Hôtel de Crillon in Paris. After delving into the Van Cleef & Arpels archives, Navet says, he decided to create “an imaginary, poetic” interpretation of the brand’s heritage in floral jewellery designs and that the project would be a playful dialogue about colour.

Navet’s flowers and stems are drawn on paper, cut out and arranged in the compositions like flowers in a vase.

“I did a lot of research on the house’s history and its link to flowers,” he says. “So I presented a big sketchbook to Van Cleef & Arpels that was full of drawings inspired by archival imagery and visits to the Louvre, where I took inspiration from Florentine and French artists’ depictions of flowers in particular.”

Navet’s work for Van Cleef & Arpels was envisioned, he says, to be an immersive experience into another world for the brand’s customers – his world, to be precise. “My intention for this project was that people feel like they are walking into a giant version of one of my sketchbooks,” he says. For larger boutiques, the project included custom-designed rugs, drapery, upholstery, wallpaper, and vases in prints that were hand-painted by the artist. For some smaller stores he designed window displays.

Navet says he rarely paints flowers in his personal work.

In designing the installations for Van Cleef & Arpels, Navet gave some consideration to local flora. “In Southeast Asia we worked with the lotus flower,” he says. “Everywhere we looked to local flowers and adapted the palette. In Japan there is a lot of pink, yellow and pastels. In America there is strong blue and red.”

One of the unique aspects of this collaboration was that Navet was able to create original artworks for Van Cleef & Arpels’ extensive network of boutiques. “Each original artwork is especially made for the place or the city it’s in, and the best part about this collaboration was having the time to produce original artworks, and to think about a dedicated design in every boutique,” he says.

Alexandre Benjamin Navet

“I have a general range of colours that I use, but I adapted my palette to every boutique in a unique way and that was kind of cool. I also did extensive research on flowers and now have a great collection of rare books on flora and plants.”

In Navet’s personal work he rarely paints flowers, but he has an obsession with painting vases – just without the flowers. So at first blush he might have seemed an unlikely candidate for a creative assignment celebrating a brand’s floral heritage.

Frivole nine flowers necklace in yellow gold and diamonds, $20,800; Frivole nine flowers necklace in yellow gold and diamonds, $29,300; and Frivole five flowers necklace in yellow gold and diamonds, $15,700

“I have been drawing vases for several years,” he says. “I say they are like actors on a stage, but people often point out that there are never any flowers in my vases. So I thought it was funny and interesting that Van Cleef & Arpels asked me to draw some. But what that did was leave a lot of room for the energy of colour.”

Navet’s flowers and stems are drawn on paper, using pencils with vegetal pigments in rich, deep colours. They are then cut out, reassembled and arranged in the compositions like flowers in a vase, and stuck down to create the drawings. “They are not just flowers in vases, but flowers that seem to have grown in and emerged from the vases,” Navet says.

Alexandre Benjamin Navet’s installations will be in selected Van Cleef & Arpels boutiques until next month.