The Jewellery by Mazlo

LA JOAILLERIE is kind of an outsider in the landscape of parisian High Jewellery. This place is indeed neither a gallery nor a shop dedicated to a brand. It is primarily indeed a dream come true for Mazlo, this unconventional author-jeweller, whose family tradition did not at all predestine to exhibit one day his own creations in a place devoted to his philosophy of art. The reason is that in the Mazloum family, jewels cannot be regarded as anything but unique and entirely handmade pieces…

Assisted by a personality test, which according to the legend, was developed by the founder of the dynasty, Georgius Sayegh el-Mazloum, the master jewellers of the family successively got the reputation to know how to identify the essence of a personality before making it a portrait through the precious form of a jewel. Yet, as formative as may be the challenge of commissioned work, it could nothing but fail to exhaust the creative fever of an atypical artist like Robert Mazlo.

First initiated in the fine art of Phoenician jewellery in the family workshop led by his father in Beirut, he then achieved his studies in the Mecca of the time in the realm of « classical » jewelry-making, the Istituto Benvenuto Cellini in Valenza-Pô, Northern Italy. Paradoxically, he shall go out of this tradition’s temple, graduated with the title of major of his class, having submitted a readymade-like jewel, called ” Tribute to Duchamp” entirely made of electronic circuits. This stunt however should not be regarded as a Manifesto, nor as a manner to revolutionize the fundamentals of jewellery by turning to new materials. It was rather as a both tender and cheeky snub to his teachers conformism and as an attempt to break the shackles of a jewellery engrained in its obsolete and dull aesthetic frames…

Craftsman and author above all, brought up in the respect owed to art and aware of the initiatic value of the jewellery task, Robert Mazlo has always refused to get out of the frame inherent to his medium. According to him, precious material is an opponent that is worth being tamed, notably by learning its secrets. It is at that cost, that of the mastery of techniques, that one true work of art can arise, regardless of the divisions between fine arts and craftsmanship.

Art and its requirements are not experienced here as pitfalls, nor as an obstacle to creativity, that shall be overcome by drawing from other sources, more accessible and maybe easier too… According to Mazlo, it is a rather simplistic excuse. Remaining faithfull to that rigorous and demanding framework made of discipline and surprises (the reaction of materials is always uncertain and random), Robert Mazlo tries to push the boundaries of the jewellery by instilling the richness of his imagination and his infinite love for Art, punctuating his works with references to the masters that have shaped his artistic sensibility.

To sum up Robert Mazlo’s purpose, it is not so much to revolutionize the jewellery and to break down idols than to return to fundamentals, by trying to draw up a bridge between his contemporaries and the sacred value of the jewel. The temporary and thematic exhibitions, organized by LA JOAILLERIE, precisely aim to revive the rituals but also the functions and symbolic meanings associated with the Jewellery since the beginnings of Humanity, a value which has gradually dissolved in customs and fashions.