Stone Age
We humans were making tools out of stone more than three million years ago, before our brains and our bodies had fully evolved to their current form. In this sense, our use of stone is older than we ourselves are. We made stone tools and then used them to bring the rest of nature within our sphere of influence. Blades and bludgeons of stone are the ancestors of all of the instruments that we make today; the origins of art are in cave paintings, petroglyphs and talismans. This object’s strongest sense is its immortality: since forever, until forever, stone lasts. Every one of our most precious and practical objects descends from a stone – including the products of Hermès.
In Spring 2017 the windows of Hermès Lisbon offer a surrealist and playful spin on the preeminence of stone in our object history. We will recall the manipulated materiality of Dali’s Persistence of Memory, and the paradoxical properties of rocks in Magritte’s Memory of a Journey and Castle in the Pyrenees. We will also hearken back to ancient and neoclassical sculpture, eternal stone totems we will celebrate the material properties of stone. We will play with the hardness, rigidity, and weight of stone by making it bend, squeeze, fold, melt and float. By contrast, Hermès products will dialogue with the stone in ways that enhance their own object sense and material identity, always evoking the idea of top-quality craftsmanship and timeless style.
