Michel Haillard, Polymorphus Artist, will give a lecture to the LSU School of Art on Monday, February 24 at 5 p.m.

Michel Haillard is a Paris-based artist that creates luxury furniture, jewelry, paintings, sculptures, and more.

About Haillard

“Michel Haillard is a child of the 60’s, who was passionate about sculpture and objects in general that he accumulated and collected at a very young age. A native Sequano-Dionysian, he crossed the Parisian arrondissements to study decoration at the École Supérieure des Arts Modernes, then the subtleties of advertising. After graduating, Michel had his first experience as an Advertising Layout Designer at Saphir-New Print, then set up his own business, as a freelancer. Thanks to his original work, he became a cartoonist for various brands and agencies, Philips, Virgule, Help, Fondamental… Inter alia. The young man has a keen sense of images, matter and words. He draws, he accumulates and he writes. In 1984, Michel directed his first animated film. For 3 years, he designed and animated numerous institutional animated films and videos, which he directed for Crédit Agricole, Télécoms, Câbles de Lyon, the Cité de Sciences de Paris… The director received 3 awards at the Biarritz Corporate Film Festival.

Between 1987 and 1991, Michel, in his creative momentum, executed in tandem with Patrick Regnard, the entire production, from writing to directing, of 104 episodes of a French animated television series, Sharky et Georges, broadcast on Canal+ among others.

The artist is incredibly creative and prolific. In parallel with the films, he worked in his studio and created his first sculptures, exhibited in Paris in 1992. For years, Michel Haillard, a hard worker, expressed himself through the many facets of his talents, writing cartoons, sculptures and finally creating furniture. It is the visual arts that hold the exclusive attention of the artist, who decides at the end of the 90’s to devote himself solely to the invention of his singular, unique, dreamlike objects and furniture!

The world of Michel Haillard is a journey to the heart of a first tribe, to the epicenter of a gemstone mine, to a punk music room or the brain of a magician who creates mysterious potions. Objects or sculptures, furniture or curiosities, each of the artist’s works questions its origin and destination. The designer’s dreams are crazy. He works with bronze, skins, horns, wood, stones, bones, horsehair, antique objects… In his studio, Michel Haillard is the flamboyant alchemist of Belleville and the Folie Méricourt. He accumulates the most diverse materials, diverting them from their function to extract a piece of furniture, an adornment, an object that tends to become a singular sculpture.

The furniture with names evocative of a Limitless World, “Karabosse” chests of drawers, “Plato” armchairs, “Perro” thrones, are made from the assembly of materials of the most disparate origins. It combines, combines, couples horns and skins (passed through customs, whose traceability is guaranteed by the CITES permit), precious and semi-precious stones, bronze, glass and many other diverted elements. The artist is rediscovering the origins of Man, who is nothing if he does not respect his ecosystem.

The common thread of Michel Haillard’s work is a precious universe tinged with humour. A cartoonist at the age of 20, the artist 40 years later, still offers creations full of magic, fantasy and laughter. During the lockdown, Michel has lost none of his inventiveness. He took advantage of this forced retirement to create “Magic Objects made in confinement” with all the resources accumulated in his workshop, a veritable Ali Baba’s cave. On the verge of trance, Michel is building a collection of unique pieces from bells, napkin rings, toys, feathers, wild pig’s teeth… From all these objects and materials, wizards’ adornments, “capped” headgear, masks, fairy lamps and other prayer wheels were born, which the Prince of New York would exhibit sitting on his vermilion alligator throne.”