Everything changes in the spring,” says Alexandre Benjamin Navet, looking out of the window of his studio, an hour from Paris. “The colours come back, energy and light,” he adds.

There are no flowers yet – spring isn’t that far along when we talk. At most, there’s a light green down over the trees, but in his studio, the walls bloom with flowers drawn in crayon everywhere. 

Navet is wearing a baseball cap and sneakers, an amiable, boyish type. An artist celebrated worldwide for his scenes, paintings, and façade art, in 2023, he crafted colourful polystyrene totems in the courtyard and garden of the Palais Bourbon, the seat of the Assemblée Nationale. His creations included totteringly charming vase structures that seemed to tease the portico of columns, and colourful amphorae planted in front of the Montesquieu statue in the gardens. 

“When I create works in situ, like the totems in front of the National Assembly or the colourful façade of the Hôtel des Arts in Toulon, which I started, I try to transport the public to a fantasy world while they remain in a place they are used to. Suddenly, the familiar image changes, everything is thrown out of balance, and reformed. Like in spring. All of a sudden, yellow flowers are blooming on the bush. You wait for it for months,” says Navet, “and just when you’re not looking, but up in the air or somewhere else, it happens – a flower... There! It’s pure magic.” 

That was the case last summer at Van Cleef & Arpels in Vienna, when, from one day to the next, huge flowers sprouted on the jewellery store’s new building on Kohlmarkt, almost as tall as the façade itself. Navet explains that this was the first time he had ever worked with flowers. 

“It was overwhelming, the richness of form, the colours, but above all, how alive they are,” he recounts. Usually, his subjects are interiors and everyday objects. The Parisian gallery Derouillon is currently presenting a Navet show with new works – paintings and wooden reliefs that he beams into three dimensions with such virtuosity, often in metre-high sculptures, that one can only marvel. 

“I am a graduate of the Parisian ENSCI les Ateliers, a school for industrial design,” explains Navet, “where I was able to acquire a real technical understanding of how all the objects that surround us are made. I’ve always been fascinated by technology, and today it helps me when I’m realising stage sets and scenographies.” 

His ability to move so effortlessly between painting and sculpture won him the prestigious Grand Prix du Design in Toulon in 2017, along with the Van Cleef & Arpels Audience Award. That was not only the starting point of his career, says Navet, but also the beginning of a creative friendship. 

After all, the house and the young designer have a lot in common stylistically. “Pure, clear colours, technical finesse, a love of narrative,” lists Navet. It could also be summed up as ‘precision and poetry’. 

Influenced by French Art Deco, Van Cleef & Arpels created a stylistic language that, while extremely precise, is so narrative that it tickles the imagination of the beholder – little poems in jewellery. Like the silky white enamel flowers, and the ladybugs of the Lucky Spring collection, edged with granulated gold beads. They sit on a chain, with the ladybug’s flowers and wings either closed or open, making it look as if the insect is flying and the little white flower is blossoming with every movement. “That’s the essence of spring,” smiles Navet. 

There is something childlike and positive about this bejewelled art, which is another way the artist and the luxury jewellery house connect. “My parents ran a gallery, my mother studied art, and for me, from an early age, there was nothing but drawing; it was like a language for me,” he shares. Even today, the seed for everything lies in his sketches. “A few lines that already carry the energy of a project or a painting. For me, the sketch is the clearest and most direct medium for dialogue and conversation,” he adds. 

When he was young, Navet went with his family to visit Jean Dubuffet’s tower of figures in Issy-les-Moulineaux just outside of Paris. Navet describes that, when he interacted with the art, it felt as if he was inside a living organism, as if he had become part of the artwork. It was a sensation that fascinated him, something he too wanted to try his hand at. 

He achieved this with one of his first projects in Toulon, which to this day breaks all Instagram records – Le Bateau Sculpture. He attached a huge painted ship’s hull with a figurehead to a somewhat drab apartment building and the Place Vatel in front of it into a colourful sea. 

“It was actually supposed to be a temporary project,” says Navet, “but then the residents wanted the installation to stay.” Today, the houseboat is the selfie hotspot of Toulon.

The interactive aspect of his art also plays a role in jewellery, says the artist – another similarity. “With a jewel, you shape your movement, underlining every gesture as if with a sparkling pen,” he says. During his research in the Van Cleef & Arpels archive, Navet fell in love with a piece of jewellery from the 1920s, a flower basket (which hides a watch) hanging from a stylised column. 

Architecture and fantasy – exactly what he achieved with Blooms in Vienna. Monumental Ringstrasse architecture, which he transformed into a weightless daydream with his giant flowers, unreal yet real. 

Curiously, talking to the young artist also has the same effect as looking at a piece of jewellery from Van Cleef & Arpels, watching the flight of ladybugs or a rocking flower basket – the smile remains on your face long after the interview is over and the bijoux have disappeared back into their caskets.