On Wednesday June 23, PIASA is holding a design auction in Brussels that provides an overview of design from the 1900s to the present day. The sale includes three works by the self-taught artist Ado Chale.
Rare are the craftsmen that critics honour with the status of artist: Ado Chale is one of them. His modesty defines him as a craftsman, his success designates him as an artist. Luxurious and shimmering, surprising and joyful, his creations are like no other. However, from the bronze Goutte d'eau table of the 1970s to the sober and splendid black and white furniture of the 2010s, Ado Chale's creations are in themselves representative of their time.
Ado Chale (né en 1928)
Goutte d'eau
Estimation : 30 000/40 000 €
Born in Brussels in 1928 and guided only by his imagination, Ado Chale is self-taught, which exempts him from any artistic dogma. He is first and foremost a man who chooses, manipulates, polishes and assembles: in a word, he is a creator. He is the one who gives life to stones, the one who sublimates a table to make it a precious art object. His deep knowledge of things allows him to reveal their immanent decorative power and to combine them freely without constraint. Peppercorns cut in half and set in resin transform a tabletop into a stunning and sumptuous piece of furniture.
Ado Chale (né en 1928)
Boîte
Estimate: 4000 / 6000 €
This brilliance is at the heart of his work. The brilliance of things, the brilliance of colour, the brilliance of matter or the brilliance of light. To do this, Ado Chale uses shells or bone, petrified wood collected from the endless plains of Arizona, pebbles gleaned from the Opal coast or the most remarkable minerals. These allow her to create unique pieces, furniture and objects in malachite or carnelian, jasper or agate that shine with a thousand lights. Ado Chale is first and foremost a gemologist. Fascinated by the infinite decoration of stones, in the early 1960s he ran a mineralogy shop with his wife Huguette, which became the inexhaustible source of his inspiration, followed by the Chale gallery at 117 Avenue Louise and finally the workshop on Rue Lens in Brussels.
Ado Chale (né en 1928)
Table
Estimate: 10000 / 15000 €
Then, after having chosen to devote himself entirely to creation, he opened a workshop where the whole of Brussels, including the Belgian royal family, flocked to choose their diplomatic gifts. His success was so rapid that in 1967 he took part in the Universal Exhibition in Montreal. In Paris, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs gave him his first solo exhibition in 1979, followed by the Musée d'Ixelles in 1986 and the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nancy, Jean Prouvé's home town, in 1994. The BOZAR Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels will follow in 2017.
