Nacho Carbonell: Escaping Forward | Carpenters Workshop Gallery
The lines between fine art and really high-end product design are thoroughly blurred. At what point does an artwork for sale become a product for sale?
Let’s say we can call a work a product, and its artist a designer, if it could be used for anything other than contemplation. By that definition, Nacho Carbonell is a designer. He makes lamps, tables and chairs that delightfully echo chrysalids and coccons.
They’re so fine though that they get exhibited in galleries. There are 30 or so on show currently, at Carpenters Workshop Gallery, and they almost seem to breathe as you look at them. They’re all for sale - at breathtaking prices starting at the low five figures and stretching to the ominous “on request”.
The lamps pictured above are destined, eventually, to provide a tasteful light source in an oligarch’s penthouse. For now the rest of us can look at them up close, on their gorgeously rusty pedestals, and see that they’re made up of shards of reconstituted glass, ribs of welded metal, wodges of craggy stone.
Elsewhere, Carbonell shows a few wall-mounted cabinets made of cork, metal and sticks. They look exactly like tree trunks when closed but, when opened, reveal shelving inside. It’s nice that he (and the gallery) encourages visitors to open the cabinet doors - and also to sit on the astronomically expensive metal chairs he designed that are arranged in the large gallery upstairs.
Carbonell is clearly influenced by twentieth century artists that aimed for the organically elemental in their work, from Jean Dubuffet to Giuseppe Penone. To which the designer adds a light fitting, a shelf, a seat, and makes products.
When I visited, on the show’s last afternoon, the artist was in this upstairs room, explaining his working methods patiently to some ferociously well-dressed guests. (The space itself, a repurposed Victorian public hall, in the wilds of Ladbroke Grove, is part of a global chain founded by a pair of French gallerists.)
Carbonell seems like a really nice and open person. I bet he was the one behind encouraging visitors to touch the works. “If you want to be a creator, find something that really makes you happy, that gives you pleasure to do,” he said, in an interview accompanying the exhibition. “The doubts and the struggles will always come. That’s why it’s so important to be able to find something that is really fun.”
His earthy and sensual designs match this friendly vibe. I’d buy one if I was rich. But of course, I’m not. All this beauty is undergirded by global capital, the sort that allows gallery owners to find a derelict space out by the Westway and spend vast sums to repurpose it.
Out the back of the gallery, there’s a gorgeous garden with a Jean Prouvé house as its centrepiece. After my visit to the exhibition, I went outside through an unlocked fire door, and walked around. Eventually I realised the door shouldn’t have been unlocked, and I was locked out; the garden opens to visitors only in the spring. Luckily, I was quickly rescued after banging on a window. I thanked the gallery worker who let me in and complimented him on the garden. He told me that it was in fact a very recent invention, despite the fact that it was filled with mature trees.
Apparently the “rich rich” owners had installed the whole thing - trees, paths and house - all at once. It had been a “hole in the ground” before. While I was walking around out there, on a cold, clear January afternoon, I’d been under the illusion that it had been here for years. And that I was meant to be there.
Nacho Carbonell: Escaping Forward is at Carpenters Workshop Gallery (London). 08 October 2024 - 11 January 2025