Variations, counterpoints, nomadic gazes: eclecticism as method.
There is a word that returns identical across a century: eclectic. It was said of Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo, a figure capable of moving through painting, stage design, image and fashion as a single continuous field. It is used today for Chahan Minassian, born in Lebanon, raised in Paris, with Venice as the natural landing point of a gaze that was already nomadic. The same word seems to mark a continuity deeper than vocabulary. It points to a mental disposition, before it is ever a profession. Minassian describes himself as an “eye”: selective, precise, trained to read the world through subtraction and omission rather than accumulation. He works on several projects at once, keeping them distinct with an almost architectural memory, as though each commission inhabited a separate room of an inner building, always accessible without confusion. This same disposition also shapes his more radical choices. Fifteen years ago, when mid-century American design was still on the margins of European discourse, he recognised and pursued it early, almost in isolation. Today that same eye allows him to work on Venetian palazzi such as Contarini-Michiel and Brandolini-Giustinian without resorting to repeated formulas, building instead a new balance between memory and present each time. For the 2026 Art Biennale he returns, for the third year, to the Palazzina Fortuny on the Giudecca, once the residence of Countess Gozzi, today a house-gallery open by appointment during Biennale week and, to the public, on the first and last Wednesday of every month. He presents a selection of his own designs – Murano glass, the Canal Grande collection, a bronze series – set alongside vintage furniture by Paul Evans and Vladimir Kagan. The gesture is above all curatorial. He brings artists from his own gallery, such as Shizue Imai, Antoinette Faragallah and Peter Lane, alongside Joana Vasconcelos and Arne Quinze, tribal art from Entwistle Gallery, pieces from the Belgian gallery Sorry We’re Closed, a work by Brent Wadden, and the work of French tapissier Phelippeau Tapissier. A heterogeneous whole that finds coherence not in resemblance, but in the tension between elements. Vasconcelos works on the intimate and the domestic, Quinze on the monumental and the geological: two polarities that, placed side by side, sustain one another. This is where eclecticism becomes a method. At the centre, Fortuny fabrics return as structural matter, used by Minassian not as surface but as a generative element of space, following the same logic by which Fortuny himself thought of fabric as light and architecture combined. Perhaps the collector’s true work is not choosing objects, but building around them a space that holds them without stiffening them. Minassian calls it, with characteristic restraint, a project. And it ends up resembling a self-portrait that updates itself over time. chahan.com
