Designer Focus: The Campana Brothers
October 2009
This article was produced by leading international art advisory firm 1858 Ltd who provide independent and impartial advice in association with the HSBC Private Bank art and design advisory team.
Born to the same parents, they were partners from the outset. Humberto graduated in 1977 with a law degree, and four years later Fernando graduated with an architecture degree. Then, in 1983, Humberto abandoned the law books to team up with Fernando at the drawing board, and they began to develop furniture from indigenous, ready-made, ordinary materials be it waste products or industrial goods. By the early '90s, their designs had already received international acclaim, and in 1998, an exhibition alongside German lighting designer Ingo Maurer at New York's MoMA truly put them on the map.
Obsessed with materials and fabrication, they are radical by being traditional. They employ common, familiar materials such as cardboard, rope, fabric and wood scraps, plastic tubes, aluminum wire in ways that are unexpected, to create works that add up to much more than the sum of their parts.
The Vermelha chair, their breakout design and still their best seller, which Edra put into production in 1998 and which costs USD$9,425, is emblematic of their unique approach. Made of 492 yards of cotton rope woven, knotted and looped around a metal frame, it was inspired by the piles and spools of rope the brothers saw in one of the many shops that line the side streets of São Paulo, where they live and work. |
"You can find almost everything you need in these places where ordinary Brazilians shop," says Humberto, 55. On a recent walk in their studio’s neighborhood, he pointed to stacks of colorful plastic bins, bunches of brooms, clusters of birdcages and batches of religious parapher- nalia, visibly delighted by the treasure trove of raw materials within arm’s reach. In the eyes of the Campanas, these are not simply cheap goods but the potential bases of colorful patterns, surprising arrangements and compelling constructions that can be combined inexpensively, directly and through low-tech methods to create other useful items. To make an early work, the 1999 Tatoo table, produced by Fontana Arte, for example, they arranged plastic drain grills into an attractive grid to create a perforated plastic tabletop without complicated tooling. |
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