Louis Vuitton reveals this year's Artycapucines collaborations with contemporary artists and their takes on the heritage accessory.

Since launching the collaborative Artycapucines project in 2019, Louis Vuitton has annually curated a handful of global artists to bring their unique creative inspiration to a reimagining of the House&rsquo;s signature Capucines bags. This year&rsquo;s visionaries include Malawian and South African textile artist Billie Zangewa, known for her tapestry collages, who brought a relaxed, aquatic scene to her Artycapucines landscape. Polish painter Ewa Juszkiewicz took a deconstructionist lens to her back-facing view on traditional portraiture. French artist duo Ida Tursic and Wilfried Mille&mdash;professionally known as Tursic &amp; Mille&mdash;used reflections on painting and contemporary life to create an open-ended, emotive scene for their project. American artist Liza Lou, best known for her large scale glass beaded sculptures, devised a pastel, color-washed effect for her hand-beaded accessory. Finally, Chinese artist Ziping Wang incorporated her bright, fragmented aesthetic in a nod to the immersive modern experience.&nbsp;
Vuitton has long embraced creative initiatives. More than two decades ago, Stephen Sprouse superimposed graffiti&mdash;and a few years later, roses&mdash;onto the house&rsquo;s signature monogrammed handbags. Takashi Murakami followed with his cherry blossom and rainbow-hued Multicolore accessories. Then came Jeff Koons&rsquo;s cheeky&mdash;and controversial&mdash;spin on the house&rsquo;s heritage, when his Masters series reinterpreted the classic works of Vincent Van Gogh and Leonardo da Vinci, while Richard Prince&rsquo;s Jokes edition airbrushed humorous lines over iconic bag styles. The Iconoclasts pieces boasted Cindy Sherman&rsquo;s fictional travel stamps and Frank Gehry&rsquo;s formal angular twists and cobalt interiors. Recently, Yayoi Kusama debuted her second project for the house, devising bold statement pieces adorned with pumpkins, flowers, and dots.

The Capucines bag itself is steeped in style history. Named for the Rue Neuve-des-Capucines in Paris, where the very first Louis Vuitton store was founded in 1854, this piece has become an iconic symbol of the Maison&rsquo;s identity since its debut in 2013. A span of creators&mdash;from Alex Israel to Peter Marino&mdash;have brought their design visions to the Capucines canvas. Each creator&rsquo;s visual language brings their particular limited-edition design into focus.&nbsp;
Among this year&rsquo;s creative Capucines voices, Tursic &amp; Mille approached the project by intertwining painting&rsquo;s historic conventions with their own modern codes. The Mazamet, France&ndash;based pair have collaborated for more than 20 years to reconsider painting&rsquo;s place in the contemporary era. Their often-ironic creativity combines image, text, and abstraction to obscure boundaries and question hidden meanings. Somewhere between painting&rsquo;s traditions and modernity, Tursic &amp; Mille delve deep&mdash;incorporating high and low references, blurring timelines and hierarchies, and aiming their precise artistic lens at the current cultural moment.

&ldquo;To us, today&rsquo;s painting is everything at once. It is enriched with so many pictorial codes reaching back through centuries of history. We like to conceive of it in a global way without limitation,&rdquo; say the duo. &ldquo;We create paintings that first appear abstract, though they actually depict paint stains or other workshop accidents. We might seek to make figurative elements appear abstract. Painting builds upon painting, and it is a thought system in its own right. We take an empirical experimentation approach, whether in terms of media, processes, images, or concepts.&rdquo;
For the Artycapucines project, the artists playfully juxtaposed contrasting elements and subtle nuances throughout the bag&rsquo;s construction. "The back part of the bag features embroidery based on one of our palettes, an involuntary abstract painting. It shows an accumulation of time, a Sisyphean quest that forever begins anew,&rdquo; share the creators. The front part bears the detail of a painting, also in embroidery, taken from the series Sentimental Paintings. The iconographic source is old-fashioned Occidental advertisements from the 1940s [through the] &rsquo;60s. [Conceptual artist] Lawrence Weiner told us that those had been the best years of his life, and that golden age had clearly been the &rsquo;50s. Anything was possible: there was a certain faith in humanity and a great deal of hope for the future. Of course, bringing back fragments of that time today throws them into stark contrast with the geopolitical situation of our times. We add a positive word or good intention to each of these re-presentations.&rdquo;&nbsp;

"There is so much pre-existing history that a blank canvas potentially contains the full history of painting. In a sense, there is no such thing as a blank canvas."

Other features of the bag also reference the artists&rsquo; works. The inside of the bag features the repeated name of a flower known in French as &ldquo;the painter&rsquo;s despair&rdquo; or &ldquo;le d&eacute;sespoir dupeintre&rdquo; (Saxifraga umbrosa), which has been considered difficult to paint due to its intricate detail. The zipper pull refers to a heap of life-sized cigarette butts in hand-painted bronze, symbolizing the passage of time, while the bag handle is made of charred cedar, alluding to the artists&rsquo; burnt flower and tree sculptures and their scorched landscapes. Beneath the bag, the wooden feet elevate it as an art object, providing a pedestal for its creative interpretation.

&ldquo;Perhaps the most important part of this collaboration is the shape of the bag. We decided to make it our own by modifying its structure to reflect the shape of our paintings on wood,&rdquo; say Tursic &amp; Mille. They have a shape initially inspired by the crosses of Kazimir Malevich, which has evolved over time into a floral cross, bringing to mind the petals of a flower or a medieval ornament...We reshaped the Capucines, and now&mdash;for the first time in its history&mdash;it has an indentation at the bottom."

While the bag&rsquo;s pictorial initially feels light and emotional, the text &ldquo;Tenderness&rdquo; appears in heavy, dripping font, which begs the question of how soft and delicate the image truly may be. The artists leave a defining read of the scene to the eye of the beholder. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s very important for us to leave our work open to interpretation. As Marcel Duchamp used to say, it is the viewer who creates the painting,&rdquo; explain the artists. &ldquo;The front of this Capucines features embroidery based on one of our works. The faces of a couple are painted free-form against an abstract background, to which the hand-painted title &lsquo;Tenderness&rsquo; is added, the letters dripping under the effects of gravity. You might interpret it as a sticky-sweet sentiment or as a despairing appeal to that sentiment, which is so cruelly lacking in today&rsquo;s world. It is up to the viewer to interpret the meaning.&rdquo; 
As ever, interpretation is at the heart of creativity and the Artycapucines designs. The myriad of forms in the collaboration reveals a boundless sense of what can be&mdash;how heritage can bridge with the arts to discover new creative possibilities and even bolder horizons. &ldquo;Our work is based on the concept of associations, encounters, and using things in different ways,&rdquo; conclude Tursic &amp; Mille. &ldquo;But whether on canvas or on a bag, no work ever really starts from zero. There is so much pre-existing history that a blank canvas potentially contains the full history of painting. In a sense, there is no such thing as a blank canvas.&rdquo;

Louis Vuitton Taps French Artistic Duo Tursic & Mille For ArtyCapucines Collab

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