Building castles in Spain

Brune Boyer’s pieces of jewellery are a crystalline metaphor for these contrasts which are united in the melting pot of Spanish civilisation. At first their appearance is often disconcerting ; a radiance comparable to the shining of the sun on arid ground, an iridescence of uncertain lines and most importantly the full force of iron, copper and wenge in their solid reality.

This external appearance combines seduction with severity, it forces the spectator to stop and look hard for the splendour enclosed within and which he glimpses through a breach in the metal or through the form’s woven texture. Each gem is truly a palace which desires immediate understanding only the surrender after a period of slow initiation, obedient to the pleasure of the spectator or the weaver.

This period of contemplation — love at first sight and progressive revelation — offers the spectator an experience similar to that which the artist experiences in the creation of his piece. Brune Boyer knows how to work patiently, inventing the precise form with the materials she has chosen to explore and she knows that the true artist does not dominate the material but in order to best transform it must both listen and obey it.

Why draw attention to the curve of a breast, to the slenderness of a finger or to the perfection of a face ? Jewellery should not add beauty to a body. It is another loud exclamation in an already noisy universe, but visually explores, through the sense of touch, a word suspended at an equal distance between a shout and silence; that of the murmur. Brune Boyer’s pieces of jewellery are the murmur made material. They have the serene importance of whispered promises, of those secret words enclosed in the heart of our existence and which keep us alive.

We can imagine these brooches lighting up a body like so many complicit smiles; these rings unveiling silent revelations, or these meshes revealing half-open doors through we may enter. These pieces of jewellery are lights to wear, and they invite us to transform ourselves into candelabras and mirrors, brilliance and glints, warmth and tenderness. The piece of jewellery is a bis-jocus, a double sided game, an invitation for two to play the grand drama of live and love. In its shining beauty we experience a truth which we have always known yet which our rational self allows us to forget: nothing is truer than our dreams, nothing more solid that Castles in Spain.