Side Gallery

Rodrigo Pinto was born in 1988 in Santiago, Chile, where he graduated in Industrial Design in 2015. Alongside his university degree, he engaged in informal studies with artisans of various specialties experimenting and learning with an array of materials and techniques. He took a particular interest in ceramics during his university years. In 2012 before studying in Santiago, he was awarded a scholarship for a pre-graduate course in Advanced Object Design at NABA, Milan. After completing his studies in Chile in 2015, he applied for an internship with Spanish designer and artist Nacho Carbonell. This internship pathed the way to a year of studying in Eindhoven, Holland, in 2016.

Returning to Chile in 2017, he opened his first workshop in Santiago. The studio focuses on constructing furniture and utilitarian objects with sculptural characteristics and a reflective link between the human, the material, and the piece under construction. The idea is to find a way to materialize and bring to life each piece with their formal concepts of a possible post-apocalyptic Earth.

Rodrigo Pinto's pieces are fragments of his imagination influenced by dreams that overwhelmed his childhood; post-apocalyptic dreams riddled with information that he uses today to develop his projects. Each piece is like an archaeological object loaded with nobility by taking advantage of the intrinsic characteristics in each material, ceramics combined with bronze, among others.

As his use of ceramics progressed, Pinto realized that every stage in the life of the material contributes to the piece's development and thus presents something new to each project. Accidents and errors contribute as much to the final work as planned precision.

An underpinning concept of Rodrigo's work is his intention to free objects from their inertia, to release them from the dictatorship of pure utilitarianism. He believes sculptural objects should allow confrontation and be free to interpretation from all angles and opinions.