Since his beginnings at the dawn of the 2010s, Fastrez has been keen to “get people thinking about the production of objects through the force of narrative.” In 2019, Vivarium, his previous collection for Galerie kreo, featured mirrors and furniture metamorphosed into wild animal silhouettes in a trompe-l’œil style, forming a universe of disquieting familiarity.

For Space Craft, he has created highly designed, very ergonomic pieces with a strong narrative dimension. The recurrence of round and lunar shapes, the grid motif inspired by the geometry of solar panels, the dynamic profiling of a console, the organic surface of a side table that evokes the materiality of a crater or the primordial thickness of a galaxy, the astronomical nods in titles such as Comet Console, Gemini Stool, Booster Side Table or Solar Mirror: all these aspects express his desire to offer a contemporary reformulation of the spatial imagination. Fastrez’s aim is to combine this universally evocative universe with heritage skills and precision craftsmanship—cabinetmaking, glass chasing, glass bush-hammering, straw marquetry—to design pieces that reflect the aesthetics of our time and its seemingly contradictory desires: on the one hand, a return to the essentials and the longing for the long term; on the other, the relaunch of the conquest of space and the reign of innovation. For the designer, an object such as the solar panel embodies this paradox. “Equally at home on a space station or on the roof of an eco-village,” he expounds, “the solar panel symbolizes growth and decline, acceleration and slowing down. I stage its presence as a simple motif that, even if it no longer produces electricity, provokes reflection on the contemporary.”