Soul 1

Charles Kapalkian

Applied in white plaster with gold leaf detailing and fitted with an integrated LED light source. When design steps into the living room, conversation is expected to follow. It was in London, a few years ago, that Frédéric Winkler of DCW éditions and the Franco-Lebanese designer Charles Kalpakian met. Each had his own stand, facing one another. Not the type to glare like wary rivals, the two instead connected through camaraderie and elective affinities. There was a shared desire to work together, but above all, for each to tell his own story: childhood, education, games, and dreams.

For Charles Kalpakian, it was Lebanon and that paradoxical freedom, after school, to run and play in a city in pieces. These memories—drawn from an urban exploration both exhilarating and traumatic—were metabolized for DCW éditions, challenged by Frédéric Winkler and his obsession with the angles of blind corridor corners.

“Draw me a light…” Fiat lux with Soul, a series of six plaster lamps designed as wall lights, to be contemplated as one would enter at dusk a dark alley suddenly pierced by an unreal shaft of light. Narrative elements of a memorial biography, these landscapes of curiosity offer Charles Kalpakian—star talent of the Parisian BSL gallery, skilled in working with metal, stone, bronze, lacquer, and velvet—the opportunity to handle plaster in his studio.

From this vernacular and humble material, he molded six figures reminiscent of Etruscan masks. Into the pure white of the base material, he inserted—or not—a plane of gold leaf to sublimate the backlighting of each lamp.

A confessed biographical exercise, Soul invites contemplation of each model through the gaze of a small metal figure, seated or standing, which DCW éditions encourages viewers to handle like a self-portrait of Kalpakian.

The Soul collection includes five white plaster lights, with or without gold leaf decoration, as well as a corner wall light designed for corridor lighting. Weighing between 3.7 and 5.2 kilograms, the Soul lamps are equipped with integrated LED lighting.