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The presentation was an invitation to discover and compare different time periods, geographic borders, and even different styles. Visual artists Fien Muller and Hannes Van Severen made their debut as the design duo Muller Van Severen in 2011. The duo explore the boundaries between art and design in a contemporary and innovative way and adopt an inventive, imaginative approach to functionality. They are constantly looking for new ways to make furniture more interesting from a sculptural perspective, without losing functionality. They succeed wonderfully in adding a personal, fresh touch to major historical art and design movements. Their oeuvre is characterised by an exciting tension between austerity and extravagance, lightness and heaviness, severity and playfulness, delicacy and sturdiness. Their fascination for materials, their sense of colour and proportions, their affinity with architectural space and their focus on the sculptural form all help create a fascinating universe. They eagerly follow their own path and experiment with new ways of using furniture, averse to fashions and trends, thus designing unique functional landscapes for living, permeated by poetry, imagination and aesthetics.
Suspended from above was a contemporary chandelier by Guillermo Santomá. The piece was designed for the architect’s solo show at the Museo Cerralbo past February 2019. In true Santomà style the piece is constructed from a variety of raw industrial materials, most likely found around his workshop. The lamp expresses the philosophy of Santomà, his desire to transform everyday objects into new innovative concepts and experiment with material limitations and combinations, resulting in an objects that conjures the view into a world of fantasy and fiction.
A new edition to Side Gallery’s contemporary catalogue, Chilean designer Rodrigo Pinto made his debut at the fair. Born in 1988 in Santiago de Chile, he graduated in Industrial Design in 2015 and self-taught in artisanal manufacturing of various materials. In 2012 he obtained a scholarship for a pre-degree at NABA in Object Design Advanzed and in 2016 he completed an internship at Nacho Carbonell’s studio in Eindhoven, the Netherlands.In 2017 he founded his studio; Rodrigo Pinto Studio based in Santiago. The design-art studio is focused on the construction of pieces with a strong sculptural character, where the intrapersonal experience with the piece to produce prevails. The objective of the study is to find the best way to materialize the author’s own ideas about a possible destruction of the inhabited territory, associating a material with each story generated from the dream.
To complement the bold and colorful contemporary side of the gallery, a careful selection of works by two Brazilian Master of Design, Oscar Niemeyer and Sergio Rodrigues were also shown at the booth. Both men were pioneers of their time, their furniture designs saw no limits, riding the wave capital investment and modernization in Brazil the two architects, most prolific in the 50s and 60s, broke with tradition creating pieces unseen to the Brazilian market. Avant-garde and more than modern, the placement of their work among prize winning contemporary designers such as Sabine Marceils was testament to their progressive spectrum.