ok so this from the nytimes....A report from our Berlin correspondent on design and society.

Masks fascinate me, as does the woolly territory between fashion and art. So my favorite artist at the recent Berlin Preview art fair was 23 year-old Frenchman Stephan Goldrajch, who showed a series of crocheted balaclavas at the stand of the Tel Aviv gallery Dollinger Art Project.

The macabre, carnavalesque spirit of the Belgian expressionist painter James Ensor seems to have rubbed off on Goldrajch, possibly during his studies at the Brussels Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts. As in Ensor’s paintings, there’s something compellingly primitive and schizophrenic in the young artist’s clusters of grotesquely-stylized faces.

The 23 year-old artist Stephan Goldrajch uses crochet and beadwork to build his demonic, colorful masks.

Stretched over polystyrene display heads, the masks resemble wearable items of clothing; slightly too-funky winter hats or out-of-control balaclava ski masks, perhaps. You probably wouldn’t want to wear these on the street for fear of terrifying fellow citizens, but their potential to be clothes is part of the masks’ appeal. Unlike most clothes, which work around your existing face, these balaclavas propose a new one — plus a new, scary personality to go with it.

Goldrajch is inspired by fairy tales, and has even written a few of his own, including the Legend of Bryone, “the most beloved princess of all times,” who gets her throat slit by the king merely for investigating a “Magnificent World” in a forest beyond the castle walls. (I love the deranged Bryone Song which explains the legend in the style of a French Klaus Nomi.)

Don a mask to discover your inner “eudemonist”: a being dedicated to procuring happiness in himself and others.

The artist has also started a Bryone Community which currently has about sixty members in Portugal, Israel, Belgium and France. The group shares a “eudemonist” view of the world, distributes “heads of happiness” (simple putty masks bearing lucky inscriptions), and makes masked performances.

So what is eudemonism? In the words of confessed opium-eater Thomas de Quincey, “I am too much of a eudæmonist; I hanker too much after a state of happiness both for myself and others.”