Since graduating from RISD, American designer Chris Wolston has come a long way. He moved his studio from Brooklyn to Medellín, Colombia, where he is working with a handful of small workshops to create artisanal furniture and lighting in a sustainable way. In recent years, he has established himself as one of the most intriguing voices in the roster of the Future Perfect Gallery. Most importantly, it is clear that 38-year-old Wolston has achieved a mature, distinctive, and personal language, which is on full display at his new solo exhibition at the West Village gallery titled Gilding the Lily. I have followed the evolution of Wolston’s work in recent years, and I have observed his vocabulary becoming more sensual, better resolved, more sincere, and less whimsical.
When I visited him hours before the show opened, Wolston told me that the phrase ‘gilding the lily’ is a misquote of a line from Shakespeare’s King John: “to gild refined gold, to paint the lily… is wasteful and ridiculous excess.” It means to spoil what is already beautiful to perfection by adding unnecessary ornamentation and embellishment. To him, it is about loading forms with an exaggeration of ornamentations that go beyond their function and instead bring a sense of fantasy. His bold pieces are dominated by embellishments, layered textures, decoration, patterns, and ornaments. Wolston is not afraid to call himself a maximalist. In this show—which opens just weeks before the opening of his upcoming solo show at the Dallas Contemporary—his pieces are inspired by various expressions in the Art Nouveau Movement, where nature plays a central role. But his pieces are monochromatic and therefore tend to be quiet and restrained in their own way. I believe that this balance and infusion of two contradictory directions is the core of their greatness.
Wolston’s interest in the handmade has taken him across the globe, where he has fabricated the pieces in the show. They represent a fascinating symphony of materiality and crafted techniques, such as sand cast aluminum, lost-wax cast bronze, hand-blown glass, and hand-built clad. The blown glass in the chandelier was crafted in Murano. The clay chairs that were hand-built in stoneware and covered with a patina-looking glaze were created at the University of Arkansas as a part of an experimental project. The tapestries were woven in Morocco, and the central sofa is upholstered in baby blue French mohair and tufted with polished aluminum daisy buttons. Infusing contemporary design with traditional values is central to contemporary design today, and in this, Wolston has succeeded.
Photography: Joe Kramm.
