Libertine punk

Refined, impertinent, dream-like, extravagant, voluptuous… None of these terms alone can describe the style of Mark Brazier-Jones. On the other hand, mix them, then pour the cocktail into a bronze shaker, heat it with a welding iron, transfer it to crystalline flutes and sprinkle with hallucinogenic spices, and you will have drunk from his creative fountain. And now you may wonder where he could have found his spellbinding formulas over all these decades…

His creations incarnate his personality. To attempt to decipher it, let us transport ourselves back to an evening in 2016, when Avant-Scène celebrated its 30th anniversary and as many years representing the star of English artistic furniture with his glamourous clientele. For the occasion, he designed a pedestal table in polished bronze fragments, its forms inspired by molecules of hydrogen. He arrived dressed as a British dandy, with a long velvet jacket and cowboy boots, his wife and muse Julia on his arm, phlegmatically strolling among the guests. A pleasant word addressed to each of them, a coupe of Ruinart held by fingers decked with rings. From time to time, he drew in his notepad. He seemed so staid—after all, he was 60 years old. No one saw him slip pieces of paper folded in quarters into the pockets of his French collectors. The next day, they would discover erotic drawings.1 Not staid at all.

He was born in Auckland, New Zealand, to parents of Swedish origin. His mother was a botanist, his father and paternal grandfather artists, while his maternal ancestor, Herbert Tornquist, was a landscape designer and renowned photographic portraitist. In a country where nature is omnipresent, with the school of “doing” as a life ethic, the child shared his time between the city, the beach and the “bach,” a Robinson Crusoe–type house built in the heart of the outback. It was a “hunter-gatherer paradise,” in his words,2 where, with his younger brother, he made whatever came to mind with whatever he happened to find.

The family emigrated to England, to the London suburbs where he lived when he was 12 years old. It was the end of limitless skies and wild expanses. It would take him months to wear shoes as the boy had always gone barefoot. “[My brother and I felt] like mutants from another planet.”3 As he was dyslexic, he did not adapt to the traditional school. Fortunately, he still had art, in which he excelled. Not painting, like his father and grandfather, but earth, in which he could find a release for all his energy. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in ceramic sculpture from Hornsey College of Art,4 and then began to create sets for the emerging music video industry.