Artist Spotlight: Florian Roeper
Written by Joslyn McIntyre
We know Florian of Studio Roeper as a highly talented local furniture designer whose work has graced the likes of Four Seasons hotels and Luis Vuitton boutiques, in addition to countless private collections in the Bay Area and around the world.
His pieces are in demand, and his studio in San Francisco’s Design District is a hotspot for interior designers and individuals shopping for art-as-furniture to place in high-end homes.
Among the bounty of gorgeous showrooms in the Design District, Studio Roeper stands out not only because every piece is designed and handcrafted
by Florian himself, but because it’s an artist-run gallery rather than a curated collection of pieces by a design professional. Walk into Studio Roeper on any given day, and you stand a chance of meeting the artisan himself.
Florian is certainly a talented business owner who has parlayed his skills and passions into a profitable studio, but he occasionally diverges from the furniture craft to delve into other mediums. Which is how it came to be that Studio Roeper is currently adorned with original paintings: a series titled High As a Kite.
“For the first time in my career I’ve been able to focus on my painting,” Florian says. “The beauty of this gallery is that I have so much wall space — perfect for my new body of work — alongside my furniture. My painting is so different than my furniture, and a lot of my customers are surprised by the answer when they ask ‘Who is this artist on the wall?’ I like that reaction, because I don’t want to just replicate my furniture style and slap it on the wall. I want to explore and express new territory.”
Indeed, Florian’s paintings are expressive and unique.
They start with wood, which makes sense, given his furniture background. But they depart wildly from there. Gold leaf, ultra-gloss epoxy resin, and lacquer adorn unique shapes with mixed-media depictions of butterflies, balloons, and halos. They are romantically articulated objects suspended in space, and they are beautiful.
Florian revels in the creative expression of his paintings. “Furniture has to be a certain size,” he says. “It has to perform a certain function; it’s a functional object that’s built to last, whereas painting gives me a nice balance as an artist because I have the freedom to design and express ideas and concepts. That doesn’t mean I don’t like building furniture — I love building furniture — but it creates a nice balance.”
About High as a Kite
Florian Roeper’s new series High as a Kite is a selection of mixed-media paintings reflecting on the nature and pursuit of dreams, and the inherent challenges in achieving them. The works consist of appealing and novel imagery, butterflies, balloons, and halos, grounded or contorted by reality. Pared down compositionally, the pieces make use of explicit graphics as visual punch line: an arrow, shot at a golden California sun with a stark black bulls eye, must kink itself to make its mark in Errochite, and an enormous Zeppelin airship is rendered in capsule form more fitting of the behemoth vessel’s actual speed and carrying capacity in Express Voyage to a Slow Place.
Using his background training in furniture-making as a vehicle for inspiration, Roeper insists on the expressive potential of blending unexpected materials such as gold leaf, ultra-gloss epoxy resin, and laser-cut wood. Meticulously crafted, and with an uncompromising emphasis on crisp lines and three-dimensionality, High as a Kite, in Roeper’s own words, is poised to “flirt with art, craft, and design alike.”
