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How architect Jean-Michel Willmotte shapes marble at Galerie Dutko
From March 19th to May 30th, 2026, the famous French architect Jean-Michel Wilmotte is unveiling his Rockstone series at Galerie Dutko. The collection will then move to PAD Paris from April 8th to 12th. Known for his pure lines, he created the collection from rough offcuts of rock he found in quarries, transforming them into unique pieces of furniture.
Architect Jean-Michel Wilmotte’s new project
Just a few weeks before the launch of his exhibition at Galerie Dutko, Jean-Michel Wilmotte received Numéro at his new premises near Bastille. In a space dedicated to AI and 3D printing, the French architect, famed for projects such as the Grand Palais Éphémère, the Louvre’s Arts Premiers galleries, and the renovation of the Hôtel Lutetia, is showing a new collection of design pieces.
“Here, we’re working to couple AI with contemporary art and art in general. For example, when designing a recent architectural project in Uzbekistan, we started by modelling the interior of a sculpture by Eduardo Chillida to produce a 30,000 m2 building, which, of course, we reworked with our own prompts and programmatic instructions. It’s our research base.”
A seasoned wanderer in the Italian quarries
Wilmotte’s Rockstone collection stands in striking contrast to this whirl of images, technology, and innovation. In opposition to this virtual world, the 15 or so pieces in marble, granite, and limestone, which have never been shown before, mark a return to corporeality and the poetry of matter. For this collection has nothing to do with AI or 3D printing. Although one would expect an architect to begin with a drawing, Wilmotte says he prefers the chance encounter, and admits to scouring Italian quarries in search of just the right abandoned fragments.
These fortuitous finds – fallen chunks, rejected offcuts, forgotten stock – become the starting points for pieces of furniture. Contrary to what one might imagine, he is not seeking perfection, but rather a lucky accident. “Reusing the rejected,” he says, the way one might celebrate stigmata.
Jean-Michel Wilmotte and strict geometry
The results are hefty consoles, compact stools, and rugged coffee tables that appear to have been gouged directly from the landscape. Left rough on certain sides, the blocks preserve the memory of their extraction, scarred by diggers, crowbars, and site accidents.
Instead of effacing these imperfections, Wilmotte seeks to highlight them, incising a strict geometry that dialogues with the rocks’ irregularities. Acuity is the heart of the matter: formal rigour, material contrasts, and an obsession for detail ensure that each of these pieces becomes a little jewel of sculptural minimalism. Metal plays a surgical role, with U profiles, thin channels, and stainless-steel structures slicing their way through the mineral mass.
Masterful craftsmanship on display at the Dutko Gallery
These frigid lines slash the stone without dominating it; instead they support and gather it, sometimes constraining it a little. Wilmotte reverently describes the Italian artisans’ precise craft skills. The engineering is discreet, and nothing is decorative, for each intervention seems entirely necessary. It takes great effort to reach such simplicity, a deceptively obvious beauty where everything is held in tension.
Glass, poured onto a bed of sand, adds a third texture, the slight vibration of its surface responding to the matt density of the rock. In the Rockstone collection, Wilmotte has blended three different tactile systems, the rough and the smooth, the raw and the polished. With these assembled blocks, which are astonishingly precise despite their great weight, elegance arises from the encounter between accident and discipline. Without contrast, there is no perception.
“Rockstone by Wilmotte”, open from March 19th to May 30th, 2026 at Galerie Dutko, 17 quai Voltaire, Paris, 7th arrondissement.
