Even though hybridization is nowadays a widespread practice, Humberto and Fernando Campana at Café de l’Horloge in the old Gare d’Orsay in Paris, still get to hear their café is an ‘esthetic shock’. There is nothing left at the Cafè de l’Horloge of the bourgeois comfort of a Parisian bistro: no red velvet, no mahogany, no brass pommels, but rather a matrix similar to that which led some of the Impressionist masters, coincidentally housed here, to travel off to foreign lands.
The café is expanding on a grand scale the mirrored methacrylate landscapes of the Brasilia collection to create huge partitions that diffuse an aquarium-blue light; alchemically transforming the silver sheets of 180 different Campana lamps into the same number of gold fragments; developing the steel weave of the Corallo sofa into vast screens; and lastly, realizing a totally unprecedented chair with a frame in gold enameled metal and a seat and backrest in blue molded polyurethane, like an anomalous phytomorphic organism that separates seat and backrest into leaves, or something similar to the map of a territory split by a great river.
