Ines Katamso is a Mural and Wall Artist but that’s only half of the story. As a girl born to the delightful mix of French and Indonesian parents, Ines expresses this ‘’duality” in all she does. Having studied Art & Fashion she is adept at treading the fine balance between these various disciplines, expressing her creative and cultural duality in her varied works.
Her underlying philosophy is that design, in general, is a matter of composition and construction. Applying this principle she exercised her vision in product designs with a charming and successful shoe brand (Seni.k). Not content with this success with footwear, she then turned her talented hand to interior architecture and started working as a muralist in 2012 (Atelier Ines.k ). It was in this discipline that David Haughton of HBA first encountered Ines and began a collaboration to create illustrated murals for HBA projects.
‘As the leading designer and architect for Sittemo Cielo, i was looking for an new upcoming creative illustrator, one who could provide a certain whimsical and feminine flavor, to offset the masculine architecture and hard geometric angles of the space. Ines was the perfect choice, adapting a Yin & Yang juxtaposition with her soft poetic pastels lines of visual story telling.
Settimo Cielo, with the meaning being Italian for “seventh heaven”, we sat together with Chef Nicolas Lazzaroni who was eager to share his passion for Northern Italian cuisine, and to help set a theme for Ines to visualize through her artwork, what followed was a menu inspired Frescoe style Mural to suggest “From the Farm to the Table” story, as the perfect ethereal visual narration for our award winning “Settimo Cielo” restaurant project.’
Painting directly on the wall surface is a simple and interesting way to conquer the space. In her own words ‘It’s a narration flowing from the architects creation. Unlike paintings, the wall art is not an “adding to’’, it has no limits
or framework and could grow everywhere. The artwork spreads and seduces the viewer with its meaning, color, line’. Ines believes wall art has to be part of the architecture and its overall environment when seen in context for example,: embracing the crack in a wall, or a column to integrate with the colour of the palm trees in the garden, or the reflection of a river – the mural is completely integrated into the space composed, specifically for this precise location, which gives it a unique value.