A collaboration with UNNO Gallery for the exhibition Volume: The Land and the Maker, presented at Fuorisalone during the 60th edition of Salone del Mobile in Milan, 2022. For this project, we anchored the exhibition with an investigation into Josef Albers and his ongoing contribution to design. Using this as our starting point, we developed the curatorial text for the show.
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This exhibition takes as a starting point Josef Albers’ series Homage to The Square (1950-1976), a series through which he developed the abstract vocabulary that he explored throughout his career as an artist, as well as his theory on the interactions of color. As he pointed out on a number of occasions, this series is also rooted in the universal and timeless forces that he encountered in Mesoamerican art during the fourteen trips he made to Latin America, most of them to Mexico: dynamic geometric forms, an honest use of materials, and respect to the colors found in nature.
Josef Albers’ series functions as a document that testifies to the principles under which the selection of Latin American contemporary designers included in VOLUME develop their works, and each of their pieces exemplifies, in turn, the values that Albers synthesized in his work regarding materials, form and color.
Habitación 116 is a Mexican architectural and interior design firm founded in 2002 by architects Rafael Rivera and Javier Claverie. For VOLUME, Habitación 116 presents its recent collection Lava, a comprehensive design project that includes chairs, tables, armchairs and stools and is the result of experimenting with volume and natural pigments inspired by Mexican earth, specially, as its title indicates, with volcanic materials. Lava is also a direct reflection of the ideas and spirit of architect Luis Barragán and Mexican Modernism of the 50s and 60s.
Also in dialogue with the work of Josef Albers, we included a Paquimé Bench by Chilean designer Abel Cárcamo a piece that bears witness to traditional, artisanal practices in his native Chile, as well as to the minimalist aesthetic that characterizes his work. From Estudio Persona, an Uruguayan design studio founded in 2015 and based in Los Angeles, we present Peel Cabinet, where sculptural shapes and feminine lines are evident and a continuity of their constant research with materials and traditional craftsmanship is represented. An oil burner named Quemador by C.S. Nuñez, a Mexican industrial designer that aims to depict vestiges of ancestral cultures in his work and bring those emotions to the modern era, is also included. And finally in collaboration with the Mexican Bandido Studio we incorporated a Tezca Floor Lamp, where a Mexican identity remains evident.
Straddling a line between sculpture and design, all the works in the exhibition are the result of rigorous formal experimentation with materials and their possibilities, while always leaving an opening to spontaneity and the emergence of organic patterns. With this selection of pieces, VOLUME: The Land and the Maker, aims to show the numerous crossings and intersections that have long made design a truly global discourse, full of unexpected exchanges and migrations of form, of ideas and of thought.
Let the objects speak!