"Portuguese artisanal culture, which has never completely broken with its traditions, taught me that the contemporary can emerge from the very ancient, provided you look at it differently. My curatorial vision then structured itself around this dialogue: how to make a very current formal rigor coexist with gestures, materials, and know-how deeply rooted in the territory."
From her base in Lisbon, where she founded OJO Gallery, Marie De Carvalho explores the porous boundaries between art, design, and architecture. In this conversation, she reflects on the shift that led her from Paris to Portugal, the emergence of her collection, and the collaborations that shape her work.
How did Lisbon transform your curatorial vision?
This geographic displacement naturally brought a shift in perspective. In Paris, I was surrounded by images, discourse, and highly theoretical references; in Lisbon, everything became more about materiality and gesture. The city's rhythm—gentler, more porous—allowed me to spend time in workshops, watching hands at work. The topography, the hills, stone, azulejos, wood, lime... all of this nurtured a more attentive eye for textures, densities, and imperfections.
You prioritize raw materials. Is this an aesthetic or ethical choice?
For me, giving priority to raw materials is both an aesthetic and ethical choice. Aesthetic, because stone, wood, earth, paper, or metal already carry within them a history, a palette, accidents that could never be invented from scratch. I often ask creators to "let the material speak," not to over-design it.
Ethical, because working with these materials in short circuits, with identified artisans, also means defending a certain idea of time and responsibility: accepting that pieces have weight, durability, that they're not interchangeable. When we produce a piece in stone or stoneware, we know where the material comes from, who extracted it, who worked it. This chain of gestures creates a form of rightness that I try to preserve in each project.
Many pieces at OJO oscillate between sculpture and functional design. How do you conceive this boundary?
I'm very wary of overly rigid categories. A chair can be a sculpture, a light fixture can be miniature architecture, a table can become a totem. Many pieces presented at OJO are designed to be used, but they maintain a dimension of autonomous presence: if you remove them from any functional context, they continue to "stand," to tell something through their volume, proportions, surface.
Rather than drawing a boundary, I try to cultivate porosity. What interests me are pieces that shift our relationship to the everyday: sitting, placing a book, opening a door... Suddenly these gestures become more conscious, almost ritual, because the object accompanying them has sculptural force.
Can you tell us about PIETRA and TERRE MÊLÉE, your pieces at THEMA?
PIETRA was born from a desire to push the dialogue with stone very far. We started from a raw block, chosen with a master craftsman whose work consists precisely of "reading" the material, its veins, its fragilities. The artist brought a vocabulary of forms—voids, curves, edges—that allowed the piece to shift from simple function toward something more archaic, almost architectural.
TERRE MÊLÉE explores another material regime, that of stoneware and fire. Where PIETRA assumes a more monolithic form, TERRE MÊLÉE works with stratification, superposition, layers—as if the earth had kept in memory several firing times, several landscapes. At the fair, I wanted these two pieces to dialogue like two fragments of the same geological narrative. PIETRA embodies mass, continuity, almost the mountain; TERRE MÊLÉE embodies erosion, deposit, sedimentation.
What do you take away from this edition of THEMA?
What I retain above all is the quality of dialogue between disciplines. The fair has this rare capacity to bring together, in the same journey, very experimental pieces and objects more directly linked to daily life, without hierarchy.
I was particularly moved by how certain creators also work with raw materials—fossilized wood, charcoal, ceramic—to create pieces that are both very contemporary and deeply sensitive. If I had to mention a favorite, I'd cite Jean-Guillaume Mathiaut's work, whose totemic furniture in fossilized wood has an absolutely striking presence: they carry within them the long time of matter, while inscribing themselves in a very current language.
