There is a particular quality to Mediterranean light that has little to do with brightness. It dissolves. Along that ancient coastline, edges soften and stone loses its certainty, matter becoming something closer to memory. It is precisely this dissolution that runs through the heart of Tamar Hadechian‘s new body of work, opening at PAD Saint-Tropez from 2 July under the title The Hand and the Tide, presented by House of Today, the Beirut-based non-profit dedicated to promoting contemporary Lebanese design.
Conceived for the inaugural edition of the fair, which extends its internationally recognised platform for collectible design to the French Riviera for the first time, the exhibition brings together more than fifty ceramic works at the historic Maison Jean Despas on Place des Lices in Saint-Tropez. It is presented by House of Today, the Beirut-based non-profit founded in 2012 by Cherine Magrabi Tayeb, who also serves as curator, with scenography by Simon Basquin.
Hadechian, who was born in Beirut and is based in Copenhagen, came to sculpture through a remarkable detour: more than three decades of practicing dentistry. What that formation gave her is not incidental. Her hands know pressure, resistance, the grammar of touch applied to living matter. With clay, that grammar becomes something else entirely: an archaeology of gesture, where the slow fold of a palm and the minute hesitation of a fingertip are not corrected but preserved, the way a shoreline holds the imprint of a retreating wave.
Nature in these works is never illustrated. Petals appear as movements rather than as flowers. Curves suggest erosion rather than intention. Vessels seem less formed than sedimented, as though shaped by geological patience rather than a single afternoon in the studio. The ceramic absorbs light the way limestone does at dusk, holding warmth and releasing it gradually.
A dual chromatic language governs the collection. Hadechian’s characteristic mineral palette, blush, sand, chalk white, olive, and oxidised bronze, anchors the works in the language of sediment and weathered stone. Alongside it, a newer register unfolds: pale pinks and light yellows that carry the softness of early morning, colors shifting between one another like light crossing a landscape from sunrise to last hour.
What is proposed, ultimately, is an equivalence. The hand and the tide are named as parallel forces, both sculptors, both agents of slow transformation. What they leave behind is not decoration but trace. For a practice that emerged after three decades in another discipline entirely, and that has since been presented at the Venice Design Biennial and Frieze London among others, The Hand and the Tide reads as both a summation and an opening: the mark of someone who understands, at a cellular level, what it means to work with material that resists and yields in equal measure.
The Hand and the Tide at House of Today, Stand 08, Maison Jean Despas, Place des Lices, Saint-Tropez, from 2 to 5 July 2026.
