Santiago Gonzalez, Connoisseur (Part I)
Santiago Barberi Gonzalez
Santiago Barberi Gonzalez, son of handbag designer Nancy Gonzalez, is president of the family business and created its men’s offshoot, Santiago Gonzalez. At the core of both the men’s and women’s ranges are unbranded, richly colored, buffed-crocodile accessories.
While shuttling between homes in Paris, Colombia and New York, and traveling extensively for business, Gonzalez is constantly on the lookout for art and has amassed a beloved collection. Santi, as friends call him, shared his relationship to some of his favorite objects with NMdaily.
All photos by Jessica Antola.
Campana Brothers’ Crocodile Chair: I looked for it for a very long time. Actually it was first auctioned at Phillips de Pury but I missed it. So then I found out who bought it, and I asked them to sell it to me, and they did, two years ago. This chair, they only were able to make twenty-four of them because the company that makes the stuffed animals went broke. I only wanted number nine [because it] has the whole plethora of crocodiles—the little one, the big one, then the middle size. The other ones have only two sizes.
La Pomme Bouche by Claude Lalanne, seen here with Santiago Gonzalez cases: I love Lalanne’s work. It’s completely surreal. I love the apple with a smile, it reminds me that things are not so serious. I always like the idea of the apple, the Garden of Eden, and that it’s not the snake, it’s the apple. An art dealer called Ben Brown found it for me in Hong Kong last year. It’s so beautiful. I see it every morning and it makes me smile, so it serves its purpose very well.
Propeller from a 1943 plane: I found it in a flea market in Paris. There’s this man who has old airplane things, and I love airplanes. Just the fact that you can fly away wherever you want is fantastic. And you cannot get more precise than with something that needs to make you fly. It’s very simple and chrome, and it’s very sexy, the way it twists ever so slightly. When you see it you really don’t know if it’s twisting or not. It’s about things that don’t tell the whole story to begin with—you interpret as you want, but they do have a function and the function is wonderful. I love things that function but they don’t need to look like they function.
Antique Confucian jade calligraphy brush: Chinese people venerate knowledge. Every year that a brush is used for teaching, they put a ring on it. [Once it is retired,] it is venerated because it touched so many people. It shows that knowledge is acquired through discipline, through repeating. Beautiful things are also produced through discipline; to get it right it takes along time and a lot of discipline. In a world where things aren’t so simple and so minimal, it’s easy to hide behind lots of décor and lots of embellishment. It’s impossible to hide when things are pure. That is what a really beautiful product is—you can see the essence in very little.
Nest Chair by Andrea Salvetti: I’m always interested in chairs, and also anything that has to do with nature. It’s like the crocodile chair in that way. The interpretation of nature is important to me. It’s sculptural, but it also works. If you remove the eggs, it’s also quite comfortable actually and the lines are quite beautiful.
Missing Object by Konstantin Grcic: It’s a solid piece of oak, and I love it because it’s precise and it’s severe, but at the same time when you hold it, it’s soft inside. So it’s surprising and it has lots of possibilities. You never know what it’s for. It’s a side table and it’s a stool and it’s a sculpture and it goes everywhere and does everything, but at the same time it’s so subtle that it disappears. You always need it, but you never knew it was missing until you bought it. It’s fantastic, it’s necessary and it’s perfect. I got it at Art Basel in November and I’m perfectly enamored by it.
TO BE CONTINUED…
