Richard Yasmine is a Lebanese decorator and designer, based in Beirut. Both impregnated with its oriental culture and fervently engaged in fashion of contemporary life, he elaborates collections of furniture and art objects that are completely new mixing precious materials, detailed patterns, pure lines and erotic allusions…
- By K.C.
- on
Richard Yasmine remains very inspired by motifs specific to a certain oriental aesthetic: shapes cut, repeated, overlapping.
For this table, for example, Everlastingreen (see above), Richard Yasmine reproduces, and reinvents the pattern of the moucharabieh and evokes, with him, the richness of oriental cultures, ottoman and Mediterranean countries that Lebanon is marked by. This oriental furniture, around which one can find sipping a cup of coffee, eat or play cards, who has travelled through the ages, Richard Yasmine wants to revive it.
The Ashkal collection of mirrors (see above) is inspired by the famous Sursock museum. in Beirut (Lebanon) whose facade is decorated with a multitude of patterns in the shapes geometrical. These hand mirrors, all sliced in pure and simple shapes – rectangles, squares, ovals or pentagons – reveal a whole other dimension, more sculptural once on their marble, metal or brass bases.
Richard Yasmine’s work is also marked by a certain taste for erotic allusions. The artist, because he also feels attached to a very contemporary lifestyle, wants to make room for the evocation of sexuality and even homosexuality within a society sometimes perhaps a little too traditional.
With his Glory Holes table, for example (see above on the left), Richard Yasmine evokes enough of the following words clearly, by its title and structure made up of polished brass phallic elements, an object with a polished brass structure. (or accessory) specific to the X universe.
More subtly, with the pair of pedestals entitled Clou (see above on the right), Richard Yasmine, evokes the idea of penetration. Perfectly imitating the shape of the nail, these trolleys recall the very function of this object: to assemble two elements. Composed of a flat head and with a sharp point, these tables only become tables if they penetrate their base. Once these two elements assembled and the pain to which this forgotten transperssion can refer, the object born.
Finally, with his series of decorative objects made up of vases, soliflores and other carafes, entitled Plugged (see above), Richard Yasmine speaks much more clearly about the problem of unprotected sex. These different containers, made of blown glass of a finesse are accompanied by brass elements that can be found in other creations of the same artist. These kinds of gilded bases, with a very phallic look, invite the containers to be used in a variety of ways on them. These brass jewellery pieces are wrapped – and protected – by glassware from quite sensational and sensual way. By choosing to present and assemble these in the following way Richard Yasmine evokes sexuality and makes a frank appeal for safer sex.