By Paolo Ulian
I first met Simon Heijdens during a short stay in Lille in the north of France, while doing a project on ceramics for Droog Design in 2003. He was a Dutch student, recently graduated from the Design Academy in Eindhoven, and already very good. We have never met again since then but his approach to design impressed me so deeply that I still follow his work with admiration. To me he is one of the most lucid and intelligent designers of recent years. At the gathering in Lille he turned up with an incredible project. He brought no designs. He had not decided the form of any of the objects he was going to create in ceramic, but just made a few pencil sketches of possible patterns of plates and bowls that exploited the physical-chemical craquelure effect, the distinctive network of fine cracks that forms over time on the ceramic surface due to sharp changes in temperature. He had thought in terms of a ceramic pattern which would not be superimposed, being applied to the surface, but growing out of the nature of the material itself, the essence that made appealing what is generally considered a defect. A pattern that appeared invisible at first and then emerged on the surface only with the use of the artifacts over time. In my opinion this is the way to understand and tackle a project in any material you find yourself working with. The good designer has first of all to know how to listen to the material and understand what it tells us, and then further it through the creative act naturally and without contrivance.
By working along these lines Simon has already produced several other projects, all very intense and close to conceptual and formal perfection. But there is one in particular that I like to remember for the elegance of the message it contains. It is the Marble Chair made for the exhibition "Turkish Marble Meets Design" at the Fuori Salone in Milan in 2008. Simon retrieved an existing marble seat he had found at Cukurcuma in Istanbul. It was heavily ornamented, so he stripped it completely of its original decoration to give it new life. With an operation reminiscent of Michelangelo, he literally drew a new chair from the existing seat-block, one that had been hidden by the opulence of the other but was waiting to be discovered in order to reveal its essence, the truth of its soul, in stark contrast with the mere appearance of things.
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