Of Stones and Stars: Table Designs by Emmanuel Jonckers

At first glance, Emmanuel Jonckers’ handcrafted stone tables, recently on view at Galerie Yves Gastou in Paris, recall pietre dure, the art form prized by the Medici in which semiprecious stones like jasper and agate were fit together to create images for placards and tabletops. But focusing too heavily on this cultural touchstone does Jonckers a disservice. The Belgian designer is clearly interested in more profound issues; chief among these is geological time.

Each table begins as a slab of schist, which Jonckers carefully selects from quarries in Belgium. Caught up in the eons-long process of the rock’s formation, flecks of pyrite and quartz in the schist serve as reminders of the slow march of geological progress. The engraved metal inclusions Jonckers sets into the polished slabs dialogue with this process. In the low table titled Libra, incised lines swirl and dart across two inset limbs of silvery copper alloy. It is as if Jonckers has pulled back a veil to let us glimpse the molecular cacophony that acts over millennia to create and transform the stone.

In addition to the space between atoms, Jonckers also wants us to consider the space between galaxies. This series of tables is titled Sidéral, which translates from French as “cosmic,” and pieces in the series are named after constellations: Gemini, Leo, Sagittarius. Indeed, the surface of the table called Casiopée, with its blackwith white specks, appears as a deep space backdrop crisscrossed by the metallic sheen of an errant USS Enterprise.

For Jonckers, shuttling between the microscopic and the macroscopic is the whole point. Our greatest mysteries exist at two unknowable extremes. Light travels around the earth 7.5 times a second and we measure stellar distance in light years, yet there are more molecules in a cup of water than stars in the observable universe. Jonckers’ tables seduce us with softly rounded forms, polished black surfaces, and metallic luster, but they quickly cast us toward profound ruminations on a dually unseen reality. “I am fascinated by the infinitely large and the infinitely small,” says the designer. “Those universes know no limits but the one of our imagination.” It is in these universes, it seems, that Emmanuel Jonckers has found an ideal home for his art.

—Brett Lazer