Two showcases that normally run as their own events shared a single historic hall in Paris’s Marais district for three days in late October. Carpet Diem, a textile and rug exhibition, and 1000 VASES, a ceramic-and-glass showcase, both run under curator Francesco Pirrello and have each staged multiple editions at Espace Commines separately since 2018 and 2023 respectively. This time, they ran as one joint show — “a unified material dialogue within the historic hall,” as the exhibition framed it — from October 23 to 25, 2026.
What was in the room
Carpet Diem’s side carried 32 textile works: hanging woven surfaces, embroidered pieces, hand-tufted rugs, tapestries and sculptural fabric works, treating the rug and tapestry format as sculpture rather than strictly functional floor covering. 1000 VASES brought 100 ceramic and glass objects made across glassblowing, slip-casting, ceramic glazing, wheel-throwing and slab-building — a vessel form stretched across about as many fabrication techniques as a single show can reasonably hold.
Hervé Sauvage, who has handled scenography for both shows individually in past editions, worked alongside Jean-Christophe Vaillant on a vertical arrangement for the joint staging — stacking and layering the two material languages through the hall’s height rather than laying them out side by side on the floor, which is presumably the point of billing it as a dialogue rather than two fairs under one roof.
Why pair them at all
Textile and ceramic/glass work don’t share an obvious production lineage, but they share something more useful for an exhibition: both are hand-process-heavy crafts currently being reconsidered as design-world material language rather than purely functional object-making, and both have been building their own recurring Paris showcases around exactly that reconsideration. Running them together, in the same building, under the same curator, makes the overlap between “craft revival” and “design object” explicit rather than something a visitor has to infer by attending two separate events months apart.
Espace Commines has become something of a recurring venue for exactly this kind of design-adjacent programming in Paris — a former warehouse space repeatedly repurposed for shows that sit between gallery and trade fair.