SLICE CHAIR PLYWOOD 1999 DESIGN BY MATHIAS BENGTSSON
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SLICE CHAIR PLYWOOD 1999 DESIGN BY MATHIAS BENGTSSON
‘The Slice chair was constructed with the same adeptness an
architect would employ to create a topological map of the landscape, evoking
the illusion of a piece of furniture cut away from a cliff face and scaled to
human proportions.’
Each furniture is painstakingly constructed from thin, laser-cut ‘slices’ stacked to resemble geological strata. Such forms appear to defy gravity, or else make solid matter – whether aluminium, acrylic or plywood – appear liquid and in flux. Although Bengtsson uses computer-controlled laser-cutting to define each form, his creative process combines the hand-made with the high-tech in unique ways. When creating each work, Bengtsson begins with drawings, then from these works up full-scale three-dimensional models. For the ‘Slice’ series of works these were created as sculptures in clay. Only then, were the works realised through the virtual space of the computer screen, rather than being created because of it.
Each furniture is painstakingly constructed from thin, laser-cut ‘slices’ stacked to resemble geological strata. Such forms appear to defy gravity, or else make solid matter – whether aluminium, acrylic or plywood – appear liquid and in flux. Although Bengtsson uses computer-controlled laser-cutting to define each form, his creative process combines the hand-made with the high-tech in unique ways. When creating each work, Bengtsson begins with drawings, then from these works up full-scale three-dimensional models. For the ‘Slice’ series of works these were created as sculptures in clay. Only then, were the works realised through the virtual space of the computer screen, rather than being created because of it.
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POETIC LICENCE - MOSS GALLERY
New York 2010
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Moss presents a gallery-wide celebration of rule
breaking, envelope pushing and taking chances. The work of each designers
featured in the Poetic License personifies the attribute by which the
exhibition is defined. Each pushing the boundary of what's been done before in
a variety of media, and each invents new forms and new processes.
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MATHIAS BENGTSSON
Mathias Bengtsson has always described himself as a designer, but
his works are closer to fine art than to traditional industrial design. Working
with diverse industrial materials and processes, Bengtsson pushes forward the
sculptural, technical, and philosophical possibilities of three-dimensional
design. Accordingly, the majority of his works are unique or created as
editions, requiring both high-tech production facilities and labour-intensive
processes. Museums on both sides of the Atlantic have been quick to acquire
Bengtsson’s works, and his pieces have entered the permanent collections of
institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Contemporary Art
Museum Houston, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and Manchester Art Gallery.
Almost uniquely for a designer around 40, his work has been shown extensively
both in fine art and design contexts, at venues such as the Design Museum,
London and the Rohsska Museum, Gotheberg, and in public galleries such as The
Lowry and Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art.
Bengtsson’s work sprang to prominence even before his graduation
from the Royal College of Art, when he exhibited his ‘Slice’ chairs at Galleria
Post Design in Milan, in 1998. Such auspicious beginnings have sometimes
distracted from the variety of his subsequent oeuvre, which have seen him move
into uncharted territory in each year since. The designer has reamined best
known for his works which adapt the archetypal forms of seating and domestic
furniture into new territories: the easy chair; the chaise longue; the bench;
the dining table. Each of these object-types offers a different point of departure,
which Bengtsson uses to expand the language of furniture design. In his hands,
the cubic volumes of a lounge chair provide opportunity to bring to mind human
forms, those of the automotive industry, and those of the landscape or sea. We
are invited to engage with his objects through different frames of reference
and on different levels beyond their functional use. The designer has said,
“I don’t count myself as a product designer. Furniture is just a platform or
medium to present my ideas and a framework to ‘build’ from. What is crucial is
that furniture has a set of known rules and conventions, and a set of minimum
requirements.” All of Bengtsson’s work is able to be used as furniture, and
indeed intentionally recalls the “organic shapes of the Danish design
tradition” in his words. However, this tradition, and indeed the need to sit or
lie down are simply an armature for his ideas. These include arguments about
the possibilities of design; about the technologies – digital and analogue –
which determine our present day means of production; and about the imagined
relation between the body, the spaces it occupies, and its environment.
Bengtsson’s determining logic is then, not that form follows
function, nor of function following form, but of form surpassing our
imaginative boundaries. His aim is to give life to what we could not previously
have been thought possible. Bengtsson begins with what he calls “the promise of
technology” – the desire to push the limits of what is imaginable, and the will
to create objects unlike any that have existed before. In the words of one
critic, Bengtsson’s works are a “quest to redefine the boundaries of design“.
This has involved treating materials in ways which make them defy and surpass
their capabilities or characteristics. Bengtsson’s palette of materials has
expanded radically in recent years to encompass a bewildering diversity of
industrially manufactured materials – from aluminium to cardboard, and from
tinted acrylic to carbon fibre. But there is a common denominator: each of
Bengtsson’s works exceeds what we thought design could be, and what the
material in question could achieve.
For Bengtsson, it is crucial that the unfamiliarity of his works is
countered by a familiar frame of reference. They are, or resemble domestic
objects which are made strange rather than artworks made functional. Rather
than creating autonomous sculptures, Bengtsson prefers the challenge of
creating a “tension” between achieving functionality and distilling ideas about
the big issues of design. Indeed the question of functionality in furniture
determines why Bengtsson continues to define himself as a designer: it is
simply that his objects serve different functions to what he calls “padded
furniture”. As he notes, “the functions of providing optimal comfort and
convenience have long been solved – the study of ergonomics was completed in
the 1960s,” he argues. “My furniture is about challenging your senses: that is
its function.”
Bengtsson’s solutions to the challenge as outlined often result in
him creating seemingly organic forms which ‘nature’ could not have possibly
generated. He sees his work as a branch of research and experimentation: that
some of his findings may find future wider applicability is an open
possibility; but in the main, Bengtsson’s activities should be seen as pure
rather than applied research. “My area of investigation is to explore what could
be the ideas of the future” he has remarked, but a popular misreading of
Bengtsson’s works is that they are intentionally futuristic in appearance. Such
an assessment is faulty on two counts. Firstly, the designer’s works begin
with, and derive from a love of materials and their possibilities, rather than
from an attempt to evoke an image of the future. It is crucial to the designer
that “my designs are materials and process-based, not ‘image-based’ – I am a
fanatic about materials, technologies, and the processes dependent on them. I
prefer the shapes of my works to derive from materials and processes, rather
than solely from a pre-existing concept or image unrelated to them.” As
outlined, his process is not that of function following form: each object comes
out of an investigation into the gap between what materials are capable of and
what it is unimaginable that they should achieve.
Secondly, Bengtsson’s works are almost all based upon achieving
what he calls a “tension” between the artisanal and the precision-engineered.
“I have never seen anything made solely on a computer which has that ‘extra
something’ which you have never seen before,” he notes. Those unfamiliar with
Bengtsson’s works often begin by observing that he utilizes high-performance materials
and high-tech processes to achieve organic forms. The genesis of each object is
far more complicated than any first impression could convey. The designer’s
first ‘slice’ chair provides a perfect example of the complexity of Bengtsson’s
process, and how each part of the process contributes to the finished product.
He has said that “I always start work with a pen and paper, or brush: drawing
provides the shortest distance between an idea in your imagination and a form.
The problems are then how you ‘translate’ an analogue idea into digital data,
and how you can produce a digital design by hand.” Having conceived how the
very first sketches for the ‘slice’ chair, the designer then created a wax
model which was literally ‘sliced’ with a knife. Each slice was scanned, then
redrawn and amended digitally. Only at a very late stage was
computer-controlling cutting deployed; and after this, the chair was
constructed by hand.
By definition, then, “every slice chair is different, is an
individual” rather than being a clinically perfect, computer-generated object.
Rather, Bengtsson’s works are artefacts which yoke the work of “machines and
the human hand” so that they feel “somewhere between both.” Technologies, for
the designer, are seldom a completely self-contained means of production. They
are more often a way of complicating our relationship to objects, and our
relationship to the modern world. Many of the machine processes the designer
has employed originated in highly capitalized and high-tech industries, such as
motor racing and aviation.
The associations of these industries and their artefacts are
unavoidable, but Bengtsson’s use of materials are often functional in the most
obvious senses. His carbon fibre works, for example, being made of
“high-performance materials”, are the lightest chairs ever made. They are not
only hollow but created from slender woven strips of filament able to support a
human being with the minimum materials necessary. A proposal for a carbon fibre
bridge linking two islands has seen Bengtsson operate on an urban scale,
marrying his ideas to those of civic engineering to suggest entirely new
solutions to age-old problems. Bengtsson’s bridge, yet to be realized, could be
the first introduction of entirely new materials into the vocabulary of
bridge-building for nearly a century. If such a process sounds singularity
programmatic on the other hand, it is worth remembering that Bengtsson has also
drawn ideas from the most unlikely of places. The process of laser-cutting
enabled his ‘slice’ works to be fabricated, but his imagination was sparked to
create them by visceral ideas. He has noted that a generation ago, some
executed criminals (elsewhere in the world) were frozen in nitrogen before
being sliced into sections. Encountering the human body as cross-sections made
it “unrecognizable” to him, both estranged and fascinating. This alerted him
the designer to how other objects could be both made comprehensible and
unfamiliar at the same time. The designer’s work has exploited a disjuncture
between our imagined archetypes of the forms of furniture and the range of new
metaphors he has brought to the field, and the sculptural adventures he has
taken his materials upon. Even at first impressions, his ‘slice’ chairs offer
up to our imagination the craggy forms of a coastal landscape more than those
of a domestic object, as though they had been eroded by the elements over
decades. In more recent works still under development, computer-carved forms
resemble the quicksilver zip of mercury underwater – a microscopic element of
the landscape rather than a section of it. By comparison, the basic cylindrical
form of a chaise longue offers up a voluptuous form whose proportions echo
those of both a panoramic landscape and a recumbent female body. Both the
acrylic and carbon fibre chaise longues conjure Henry Moore-like hills and
hollows, evoking both the macrocosmic scale of the land and the familiar
contours of the human form.
His unorthodox methods, and insistence on combining craft skills with mechanical
means help the designer’s works accrue several levels of meaning. And he
continues to push forward boundaries of what might be possible in
three-dimensional design in ways we could scarcely expect.
Alistair Robinson, 2008
