LONDON.- Carpenters Workshop Gallery announced that Spanish artist Nacho Carbonell has joined the gallery and is holding ‘Light Mesh’ a solo exhibition of the artist’s work in London. The show presents a selection of new lamp sculptures from his ‘Cocoon’ series created with the gallery and produced using a unique form of plaster, which incorporates sand and textile hardener, set around a steel frame invented by the artist.
The four ‘Tables Cocoon’ are comprised of organic-shaped semi-transparent cocoons varied in form, fitted by a loosely structured sand-coloured mesh, illuminated from the inside so that the light diffuses through producing a natural warm light. Each unique, these four hybrid works, tables and lamps at once, seem to suggest expressive creatures, as fantastic as fascinating.
‘I like to see objects as living organisms, imagining them coming alive and being able to surprise you with their behaviour. I want to create objects with my hands, then I can give them my personality. I turn them into communicative objects that can arouse one’s sensations and imagination. In short, what I want to create are objects with a fictional or fantasy element, that allow you to escape from everyday life.’ – Nacho Carbonell
Nacho Carbonell was born in Valencia in 1980. In 2003 he graduated from the Cardenal Herrera University in Spain. In 2007 he earned a second degree from the Design Academy Eindhoven in The Netherlands, where his two graduation projects ‘Dream of Sand’ and ‘Pump It Up’ brought the young designer immediate international attention. The artist is now based in Eindhoven with his team and studio.
Nacho Carbonell creates collectible pieces that span the fields of art and design. His limited-edition designs have been shown in galleries, museums, and design fairs in Europe, Russia, India, Japan, Israel and the United States. His work has been exhibited several times at The Salon Del Mobile in Milan.
The Design Miami fair and The London Design Museum announced Nacho Carbonell as their artist of the year in 2009 for his highly imaginative collection ‘Evolution’, a set of hybrid seats already using the cocoon patern to question the dichotomy between public and private space. The artistic credos of Nacho Carbonnell is based on his elimination of boundaries and expanding the field of design by experimenting and searching for new opportunities. Many of Nacho Carbonell’s works imply interaction, inviting a viewer to communicate with the object, participate in a certain sense in a true process of creation. Nacho Carbonell expresses the idea of communication through objects, linking the object with a user.
The artist’s main goals are questioning conventional ideas of product design, escaping trends, exploring tensions between design and art, form and function, nature and culture. Nacho Carbonell’s approach to work is related to the idea of desiring objects instead of creating something just because of the need of it. Concerned by the idea of objects loosing their value in the long-term, Nacho Carbonell defends the idea of the objects’ life cycles, creating the pieces that would have deeper conversation with our basic needs.
This approach to the creative process and his constant search of a metaphor lets the artist design conceptually charged objects and installations, such as interactive chairs that adapt to the shape of the body, while the user’s weight inflates animals around it. The artist lets his creations tell their own story by presenting them in a ‘fairytale-like’ manner, which goes beyond pure functionality.
