“A piece of furniture must radiate silence in order to be loved for a long time,” says Eric Schmitt, who prefers to show rather than explain. A man who shies away from the spotlight, he lets his objects speak on his behalf.

The arch of a marble cabinet or the silhouette of a Jarre table, seemingly destined to exist ad vitam aeternam, evoke a childhood spent in Poitou among Romanesque churches. He began as a self-taught artist, welding all his early pieces himself—his urban, raw, rock’n’roll period, marked by the rhythmic pulse of his hammer. When Schmitt strips away all ornamentation, he does so through the lens of balance—or the illusion of its loss—with folded bronze tables and consoles paired with materials that contrast against the rigidity of metal. And yet, he can never resist a curve. A utopian, tirelessly searching for his own vocabulary of form.

The Fontainebleau Forest, which spills into his workshop, inspires free organic shapes—a symbolized nature present in his series of tree stumps and bronze rocks. Schmitt always moves within chiaroscuro: light and density, the fusion of past and future.

As Cocteau once said, “everything fashionable goes out of fashion,” and it’s always bold to call something timeless—but Eric Schmitt’s creations strive toward that very category. Almost indestructible, they resemble relics of a civilization yet to be imagined.