Documentary - Gilles Jonemann



2009 23 min - with English subtitles - DVD


November 30, 2011 On the occasion of the third Saint-Eloi festival organized by the Grenat Institute , the documentary film directed by Romain Claris about Gilles Jonemann, creator of jewelry and objects, will be shown during the movie evening on the jewel thematic at the Institut Jean Vigo in Perpignan.




Gilles Jonemann creates jewellery and objects; in his workshop can be found many different tools and machines, natural and synthetic materials: seed, pieces of earthenware, bits of surf-polished glass, fragments of plates, rubber, shells, steel wire.
Gilles Jonemann has been working on a project for Herm�es since 2006. In the Seventies, he met Andre Courreges, a French fashion designer, who bought several pieces of jewellery from him; Gilles then went on to work for the Morabito fashion house for three years as a designer. He made 800 unique pieces for Haute Couture fashion shows put on by Per Spook, a Norwegian fashion designer. He met Issey Miyake who ordered about fifteen objects inspired by a nomadic lifestyle, symbolic luggage.
Gilles Jonemann also hosts training sessions in Switzerland, Mali and Madagascar, and has been training many designers for about twenty years. In 2003, the French Ministry for Culture awarded him the title of "Maitre d'Art" (Master of Art). He taught Marianne Anselin, one of his students, his knowledge, techniques and approach for three years. Gilles strikes a balance between design and teaching, saying "these two disciplines are mutually enriching, teaching makes me keep up-to-date and think a lot".
Gilles Jonemann's work begins on his bench plate, where he combines shapes, colours and conflicting materials to create a subtle balance between size and proportion. Gilles thinks that jewellery cannot exist without its environment, our body. Jewellery comes to life because we wear it. As he says, "While our modern world is to be invented, nature is yet to be discovered. These two actions, discovering and inventing, can probably be considered as our two main activities. Our inventions often result in the destruction of our ground of discovery. I think that is the message included in my work, in an attempt to reconcile synthetic and natural, past and future, living and artificial, with the help of representative materials".
Naila de Monbrison, a gallery owner in Paris who has been exhibiting Gilles' work for about fifteen years, explains that "women buy Gilles' jewellery for poetical reasons, that his jewellery is made to carry a story, a nice story".


2010 nov. the documentary about Gilles Jonemann is selected at the 2010 Cabrières d'Avignon Cinema Meeting.



February 2010, the 23 minutes documentary portrait about the jewels and objects designer Gilles Jonemann is registered to the "Marché du film court" in Clermont-Ferrand and could be seen at the video library by the professional members www.clermont-filmfest.com