Gilles Hertzog

Frederic Zaavy's brilliant career as a master jeweler manifested like a meteor but flamed out way before his time. He considered himself the heir of John Baptiste Tavernier, gem dealer to Louis XIV and the inventor of independent business travel, and in his own life was chosen as the top jeweler for the 21st Century iteration of Fabergé. Zaavy's genius was his painting with stones and the development of remarkable structures for holding those stones almost invisibly.
His work expressed the latest in a thousand-year evolution of the highest level of French jewelry creation. The influences on his life and work were myriad. Nature, quantum physics, art, poetry, music, literature, spirituality and even science fiction all shaped his extraordinary world view and taste. He was a philosopher jeweler. Stardust captures the last year of his life, from the moment when he knew he was soon to die and ending with his life still at full throttle shortly before his passing.
With a stunning visual narrative by photographers John Bigelow Taylor and Dianne Dubler, and a text by acclaimed French philosophical writer Gilles Hertzog, Zaavy's work and life are presented as a portrait of what was and what could have been.