Les ruines de la lumière, curated by Emmanuelle Luciani, was presented at CEAAC,
Strasbourg by Fondation Hermès. The exhibition followed Jacopo Pagin’s 2025
residency at the Cristallerie Saint-Louis, undertaken at Luciani’s invitation within the
Fondation d’entreprise Hermès Artists’ Residencies programme. For the 2024–2025 cycle,
entitled Passé Présent Futur, the Fondation entrusted the artistic direction of the
programme to Luciani, who selected and accompanied four artists through residencies
within Hermès manufactures. The cycle reflects on intersecting temporalities and on the
relationship between conservation, transmission and innovation within craftsmanship and
artistic creation.
Pagin’s residency continued a long-standing collaboration with Emmanuelle Luciani. In
2020, for Anima Mundi, presented at the Abbaye Saint-Victor as part of Manifesta 13 in
Marseille, the iconography of glass was already present in his paintings. At Saint-Louis,
through close contact with the expertise of the manufacture’s craftspeople, Pagin took an
important step in his practice, moving from painting to sculpture, from fantastical visions to
tangible forms.
During the residency, Pagin worked directly with crystal, a material that had long inspired
his painting, producing a series of anthropomorphic vases. Combining surrealist motifs, Art
Deco forms and New Wave influences, the works inhabit a poetic and mysterious register.
Working within the decorative tradition of Saint-Louis, Pagin explored the manufacturer’s
different techniques alongside its craftspeople, developing highly specific forms and
subsequently using processes including acid etching to transpose his ornamental motifs
onto the surfaces of the crystal.
Across the surfaces of the sculptures emerge insects, atomic bombs and grimacing faces.
Stretched across dark tones selected from the Saint-Louis repertoire, these unsettling
figures evoke a form of decadence and strange beauty associated with end-of-cycle
aesthetics such as Neo-Romanticism.
Taking its title from the eponymous series of vases, Les ruines de la lumière brings together
sketches, paintings and crystal vessels. The works establish a singular relationship
between the ceremonial elegance of the crystal object and Pagin’s radical iconography. The
idea of the ruin occupies a central place in the exhibition, the crystal vase, traditionally a
symbol of opulence, becomes at once an anticipated ruin and the vestige of a possible
future. Behind the captivating darkness of its materials and forms, Les ruines de la lumière
nevertheless suggests the possibility of survival and renewal.
