François Royer began making his Stanker line of side tables by transforming recycled oil barrels (see results after the jump) in his Paris basement five years ago. Now based near Montpelier in the south of France, he has started Motxo design, which includes abandoned supermarket shopping cart chairs, pencil holders made from painter's grids and a light table made from a discarded washing machine drum...
Above left is one example of an oil barrel transformation. (If you go to his website, you can roll over the oil barrels for a nice before and after glimpse of each unique piece.)
You can see more of Royer's work here.
- Kristin Hohenadel blogging from Paris. She can be reached at kristin @ apartmenttherapy . com
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Create Art!
It's like buying art of sorts---hoping to have one of the first and hoping that it will become very collectable and will be a conversation work in your home. Probably small museums are buying them up also.
With pieces like these, context is everything. A scorched & rusted multicolor oil drum like this (with, let's say, a 1-inch glass top) placed on axis in the center of a blinding white minimalist foyer furnished with only a Helen Frankenthaler on the wall and an all-black Louise Nevelson in a corner--or, conversely, in the sumptuous foyer of a Beaux Arts apartment from 1910, with heavy moldings & parquet-de-Versailles floors--could look great. But put the same rusty barrel in the foyer of one of today's overgabled cookie-cutter suburban mansions and it would look like a wino at a wine-tasting party. No one would even make eye contact with it, and if they did, they'd politely avoid mentioning it. And in the illegal loft squat of a bunch of cutting-edge art students it probably wouldn't even be noticed.
And that goes double for the shopping cart hack. Chicago's homeless population brought that particular art form to perfection a long time ago. The main difference between their customizations & this one is attributable to whatever cachet derives from the fact this shopping cart chair comes from an ARTIST in PARIS. It's Duchamp all over again. How revolutionary.
These are OK I guess. Magnaverde's image of the oil can in the McMansion is still stuck in my head. Akk!
There is a guy in Seattle who creates whimsical animals from old oil cans.
http://www.homegardenart.com/recycled_metal_animals.html
I long for a chicken.