The King's gambit of Patrick Coard
On May 16, home furnishing and décor mecca W/17 launched the new collection of Patrick Coard, an Irish-Danish artist who moved from Paris to the Philippines during the pandemic and settled here with his young family.
What spurred such a big move? Coard (pronounced “Cord”) is married to a beautiful Filipina, Kifu Augousti, the daughter of Ria Macasaet and Yiouri Augousti of Parisian furniture store R&Y Augousti.
Kifu had grown up and was living in Paris when she and Patrick met through a mutual friend. (Patrick had been living and moving between France and Denmark since he was a baby.)
They fell in love, got married, and now have a daughter, River Luna.
“We were going between Paris and Cebu, Manila, New York — that was kind of our triangle,” Coard says. “But now the Philippines is our home and we’re super-excited.”
W/17 partner Kaye Tinga met Coard through his father- and mother-in-law Yiouri and Ria Augousti. “That’s how we started,” Tinga says. “I was making parinig ng konti, like, baka we can represent you,” she laughs. “And then he moved here, and started his own line as well.”
Kaye was drawn to Coard’s art because of his very bold blend of elements and textures and materials. “At W/17, we always choose to carry pieces that we would be proud to have in our home, and we knew that was the case with Patrick’s collections,” she says. “The way he creates sculptures, candles, and the like, he respects the natural material and form, allowing it to breathe and grow through his designs into something like organic modernism.”
Coard, who studied at the Copenhagen School of Design before working as an architect in Europe, has always been drawn to very natural, organic shapes.
“I’m kind of crossing a bridge at the moment,” he muses. “I started with my sculpture candles. I had this obsession of I wanted to make the most beautiful candles. And I was traveling around the world to find out, how are you going to make these huge candles? And going from scale, I started working more with the complexity. And so I went from, like, 100-kilo sculpture candles down to small ones that are more refined, with shagreen textures carved with brass or shell inserts.”
I can see these candles behind transparent screens that turn W/17 into a rather magical maze where large, golden sculptures stand sentry at every turn.
“I kept the candles inside so as the night moves forward, people can kind of go in and it’s more of a boudoir feel,” notes Coard. “They can enjoy themselves and the candles have a lot of ambience.”
From sculptural shagreen candles with metal, Coard’s medium morphed into a more permanent material — bronze-patina brass — and he started creating solid sculptures and lighting objects inspired by music in a series called “The Symphony.”
“There are a lot of new visual languages that I’m exploring, so I’m quite excited,” says the artist, who loves working with scale.
His new collection, “The King’s Gambit,” consists of large-scale sculptures in that very same material, with towering, abstract shapes, so I ask if he was inspired by chess.
“Not at all,” he replies. “It has everything to do with we’re moving here now and it’s a new chapter. And it’s the right move. That’s what it represents. When I was doing setup, I started doing a grid, but it’s not to be taken too literally. It’s more the move here, that it’s the right move.”
Coard says the way he works is very freehanded and tied to energies. “It’s an intuitive approach. If something is drawing me towards something, then when it’s done, I know what it means.”
The first collection he did in the Philippines was called “Great Expectations,” sculptural candles that were abstract expressions of characters that would reappear in later collections: the Oval Queen, Prometheus, the King’s Brother and the Tower.?“I was very excited, I was very young and, like, wow! I loved everything,” Coard enthuses. “And now my visual language and recent journey, I feel it’s matured. But what’s curious is that the connection with the Philippines… I mean I’m trying to understand why I feel so connected. On one side there’s my family: my wife, she was born in Cebu. And my mother-in-law’s from Manila — Montinola-Macasaet. So in that sense, I live with it every day where I feel very connected, but I think there are other levels more to it, where it may have something to do with me being half-Irish, or -Danish. There are just certain values that I nurture, like family.”
So it seems right that he would dedicate “The King’s Gambit” to his young daughter. “Becoming a father and seeing the world through my daughter’s eyes where everything is so pure, her curiosity so magical, gave me an incredible, newfound adrenaline with my work,” he says. “I wanted to explore new, ambitious scales, different ethereal qualities through a range of materials, constantly pushing the boundaries. This collection is a dedication to my curious little explorer: River Luna.”
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W/17 is Warehouse 17, La Fuerza Compound, 2241Chino Roces Avenue, Makati, open Monday to Saturday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Call 8478-1717 for more details.
