Jaime Hayon Creates a Kaleidoscopic World With His Pencil
“As a child in school, I drew while they were doing literature or history. At the beach with my parents, I drew in the sand. Early influences were Salvador Dalí’s sketches and Pablo Picasso’s Guernica at the Reina Sofía museum in Madrid, where I grew up. Later, studying in Paris, I went to an exhibition on Peter Beard and was impressed by his sketchbooks from Africa.
Sketching is a progression of my mind, a way of connecting thoughts. It’s a precious liberty with no limitations, only the edges of the paper. Now we have technology, but without the freedom of sketching, there is no passion. And sketching is a universal language. (I also speak English, French, Italian, and some Portuguese in addition to Spanish.) I have my favorite places in Paris, London, New York, and Tokyo to buy the black pencils I like to use—brushes, too.
This pencil sketch, showing Hayon Studio’s installation for Caesarstone that just appeared at Fuorisalone in Milan, took only minutes, yet everything holds together. The pavilion displays Caesarstone laser-cut into shapes at different scales—from masks to furniture and architecture—and assembled like marquetry to create a kaleidoscope effect of colors and patterns, a total world. I chose Stone Age Folk as the name, because all countries have folklore.” –Jaime Hayon