A dance production, an office chair, an air conditioning unit and several pieces of jewelry. These are just a few of the projects on Arik Levy’s to-do list this month. We met with this maestro of many things at his studio in Paris.
“I was a disaster according to business people, they said ‘you’re crazy!’ You can’t work across so many fields; you have to concentrate on one thing to be successful. That was the attitude when I set up – but I was right!” Levy grins, and leans back in his chair. We’re sitting in a glass meeting room in the middle of the Paris studio he shares with business partner Pippo Lionni and their 20 designers, busy at work around us. Under the banner L Design, the studio is currently working on around 100 ideas, spanning everything from graphic identities to sculpture. And since setting up in 1997, they’ve created a sophisticated balancing act: In good years, “glam” projects for the likes of Swarovski and Baccarat see lump sums arrive in the company account, while quick “face-lifts” for hard-up brands keep the money trickling in when the market slows.
But clever as this arrangement sounds, it was never a master plan. “I’m totally dyslexic,” says the Israeli-born designer. “Now people think being multi-disciplinary is the best thing you can do for your business – for me, it’s just the way my brain is wired. I was a complete disaster at school, so I found different ways of saying what I wanted to say, in 3-D.” Today, these “different ways” include projects for the likes of Kenny Schachter Rove gallery, Vitra, Desalto, Molteni, Frag, Ligne Roset, Zanotta, Swedese, and Swarovski. His ability to flit between disciplines and cultures has made him a name as big as they come in the design scene, and this year, he joins a legacy of A-list designers as guest of honour at the Stockholm Furniture Fair.
It’s an incredible success story. But with so many varied projects rolling out of the studio, is it possible to have a methodology? According to Levy, displacement, culture shock, dyslexia and “the loss of this finger,” he says holding a stubbed digit in front of me, amounts to an “absence” that pervades his work, from the broader concept of a piece right down to the treatment of its material. We’ve come here to understand the relationship between his objects. And to see if his philosophy holds.
“We won’t need long, I am an interview pro,” Levy emails me before we meet. Face to face, he is just as confident; and he is certainly well rehearsed. Over fika – a tradition he picked up from a homesick Swedish intern – Levy reels off elaborate anecdotes I’ve read in previous interviews. But you wouldn’t know; he speaks with such energy and enthusiasm you feel like he’s thinking everything up for the first time in front of you. In the past he’s gotten so carried away in interviews, he’s allowed journalists to believe he’s formed previously documented ideas while talking to them. But then amiable as Levy is, he is also savvy; he knows how to work the system, and how to make a good story.
Read more in FORM 1/2011.