30/10/2026
Yves Macaux × Jennifer Shorto | Design Miami.Paris 2026
At Design Miami.Paris, Yves Macaux’s stand greeted visitors in the entrance hall of the Hôtel de Maisons. There he brought together works by Josef Hoffmann, Otto Wagner, Adolf Loos, Koloman Moser, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Franz von Stuck, Emmanuel Pontremoli and Salvador Dalí, its walls hung with Jennifer Shorto’s Météores wallpaper.
Météores scatters geometric medallions in gold and charcoal over a bronze ground, with golden comets expanding from graphic rectangular frames. The medallions draw on ancient Celtic symbols from lands that would later form part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the same world that produced Hoffmann. Drawn by a surrealist’s hand, the design is disciplined, built on symmetry, repetition and an almost architectural sense of order, yet there is a wildness running through it, its pattern pushed to the edge of fantasy. Hoffmann arrives at the same graphic language from the opposite direction: stately, austere, every line held in check. Side by side, they make an unlikely but entirely apt pairing, each drawing out what the other holds back.
The room bears it out. Dark Secession cabinets pick up the rhythm of the paper’s stripes in their slatted galleries. Adolf Loos’s brass lantern hangs on its chain, faceted like a cut stone. Black lacquered chairs catch the light in small rounds of mother-of-pearl, like circles lifted from the wall. And in a red velvet case, three rows of cutlery tell the story in miniature: Hoffmann’s, its handles ornamented with leaves and tipped in malachite; Dalí’s gilt pieces, curling into snail shells; and Pontremoli’s designs for the Villa Kerylos, in the Greek spirit of the villa itself.
A wallpaper rooted in ancient symbols and drawn with a surrealist’s freedom, Météores proved itself as much at home in Vienna as anywhere.
