Exhibition "Men's Rings, Collection Yves Gastou" (Hong Kong)

Exclusively dedicated to men’s rings, the Yves Gastou Collection comprises a thousand examples gleaned from antique markets and stalls or brought back from his travels over some thirty years. The Gothic-mystic world that fascinates this collector and gallerist is recreated in the exhibition at l’ECOLE, School of Jewelry Arts. Here is a richly ambiguous ensemble, in which paganism and High Church come together against a backdrop of vanitas images.

As for his extraordinary collection of men’s rings, that was less widely shared. Before now. It is Gastou’s personality as a collector, previously over-shadowed by his public life as a dealer, that this exhibition reveals. Here is an ensemble accumulated with a mixture of intensity, doggedness and daring over more than thirty years, on this indefatigable collector’s usual hunting grounds: antiques sales, auctions, jewelers’ stocks, studio collections, but also on his travels. At once a history of art, a challenge to genres and a manifestation of the unconscious, it takes us on a journey in time and space. Both erotic and mystic, jewelry is a talisman, becoming part of the wearer just as it bestows strength and confidence. A sexual or religious symbol, the ring embodies the union with God, the unofficial union of lovers and the hallowed union of spouses; it interpenetrates with the body, dissolves into it. Reflections of Gastou’s peregrinations, fragmentary records of personal life, of carnal bonds (the birth of children, tokes of love), his collection is the book, the epic of an intimate confession. A rich ensemble of a thousand rings, it paints his Chinese portrait in as many moments of beauty, of dreams made tangible, of bewitching enigmas, of memories materialized and possibilities embodied. The vertiginous accumulation bespeaks Yves Gastou’s insatiable appetite for beauty. The collection, in a word, is his magnum opus, one that, like Gothic cathedrals, is never finished.

The most emblematic pieces in this collection are being presented at L’ECOLE, School of Jewelry Arts. The choice of rings in the exhibition was made to represent seven key themes : the neoclassical, chivalry (signet rings), the Gothic, religion, vanitas, ethnic jewelry and curiosities. These seven sections reflect those of the book, Bagues d’hommes (Editions Albin Michel), which are shaped like the chapters in a novel, a narrative that visitors and readers will discover as they explore the sequence of the display and the objects that cristallise its themes (a statue of Joan of Arc, angels, a crown, the Cross, etc.). Each ring tells a story that relates to the collector, whom it mirrors, and who identified with it, like so many small parts of his own character.