To exhibit in Venice is to immerse oneself in a world of water and sky, to lose oneself among its canals and to wander through its countless bridges and narrow alleyways. Here, like nowhere else, light fragments, glides across the water, plays with materials, and seems to converse with time. Artistic craftsmanship is rooted in this same intimate relationship, this same slow and imperceptible evolution: born of a gesture as precise as it is precious, passed down through the centuries and endlessly reinvented.

If the Age of Enlightenment laid the foundations for a worldview centred on reason and progress, it also established a critical relationship to the world, built on observation, experimentation, and the questioning of inherited knowledge. Within this intellectual landscape, the artisan held a central place: that of a producer of knowledge through and with matter. Today, this legacy takes on renewed relevance in a very different context, one marked by acceleration, dematerialisation, and a growing loss of reference points and contact with the very processes of making.

The works we have chosen to exhibit embrace the gesture as an act of resistance. In the face of automation and seemingly limitless reproducibility, they assert themselves through their singularity, their irregularities, and the slowness with which they were conceived and crafted. Here, light is neither a simple source of illumination nor a decorative element; it challenges the object by revealing the tensions and roughness that constitute its richness, and the shadows that preserve its mystery. It becomes a critical tool that exposes the materiality of making and renders visible the singular time contained in each gesture.

Thus, to celebrate Venice alongside Homo Faber, we wished to bring together more than sixty works and objects of exceptional quality created by some of the Grand Duchy’s most accomplished artisans, revealing the singularity and richness of artisanal savoir-faire. The Casa San Lorenzo became the natural setting for this unprecedented contemporary cabinet of curiosities, a place where the hand illuminates matter, and where matter, in return, elegantly illuminates the way we inhabit the world.

Jean-Marc Dimanche
General curator of
De Mains De Maîtres Luxembourg