Friedman Benda is pleased to present In a Landscape, Ferréol Babin‘s first solo exhibition in New York, opening March 6, 2026. Debuting a new body of work, the show introduces an intimate dialogue with painted furniture, opening a new dimension in Babin’s practice and deepening his ongoing reflections on nature and the act of making.
Working with wood from neighboring forests, he cultivates a deep connection with his surroundings. The trees themselves — their textures, rhythms, and forms — shape Babin’s sensibility. Rooted in place yet creating his own world, his work feels deeply personal, a reflection of both his lived environment and inner landscape. In contemplating nature and looking at details — as if finding shapes in clouds or branches — he explores the tension between how nature is depicted in painting and how it can be embodied in an object.
For Babin, painting is an act of improvisation — a means of expressing and exploring the landscape that surrounds him. Distilling fragments of the countryside into color and texture, he treats wood as his canvas. The gesture of painting introduces a new pleasure to the process of making furniture: what once ended with carving and oiling now continues with visual cues drawn from his observations. A sense of sincerity runs throughout his practice — an honesty anchored in clarity, material sensitivity, and craftsmanship. Painted furniture has long existed within folk traditions but remains rare in contemporary design; here, Babin gives that lineage a quiet nod, weaving it into his expansive vocabulary.
Each work bears the tactile presence of its origin: the grain of the wood, the trace of the hand. “Even if I’m a dreamer and an artist, I’m also a product designer and enjoy rationality and functionality,” says Babin. By balancing utility with a quiet invitation for contemplation, he aims to make objects that are companions, grounded in nature yet not imitative of it. A self-taught maker, Babin continually challenges himself to develop new technical skills. His process is intuitive, as if drawing with his hands. In the studio, he seeks to merge his “design brain” with the freedom of a sculptor’s imagination and the craftsman in him — a balance he describes as a mind “split in two.”
Babin’s workshop, situated within his home in the French countryside, is the center of this dialogue. There is no physical boundary between his domestic and creative spaces; the same spirit that inhabits the house flows into the work. He knows what it means to live with his objects, and he makes them with that understanding — allowing them to contribute to the everyday, transforming the spaces they inhabit. Ferréol Babin works slowly and intuitively, constantly in collaboration with his materials. In a Landscape reveals the depth of his practice, which is rooted in place, guided by touch, and devoted to the act of seeing.
ABOUT FERRÉOL BABIN
Born in 1987 in Dijon, France, Ferréol Babin after graduating in Space Design at ENSA of Dijon, moved to Japan to the Nagoya University of Art & Design, where he decided to focus on objects by realizing that through architecture and space, he couldn’t fully express himself. He soon noticed that light appeared to be his favorite material to work with, for its ability to be linked to both an object and the space surrounding it. In 2014, he was selected for a one-year residency to work at Fabrica, the Benetton’s communications research centre, based in Treviso, Italy where his projects included industrial design, scenography or conceptual installations. He is dedicated on making unique pieces, with an obvious brutalist yet delicate approach. His projects are always based on an awareness of rationality, combined with a poetic and emotional dimension.
