‘Clear cut, cave in’ is a semantic exploration of hardness and softness at Room 6x8

The first solo exhibition in Asia by London-based designer duo Soft Baroque is currently making waves at Room 6x8, an exhibition space in Beijing that is confronting norms surrounding the typologies of art galleries and museums in both China and the world over. Presented in association with Gallery Sohe, the show, titled Clear cut, cave in, is on view from 22 December 2022 to 12 February 2023, and features a bipartite display comprising two chapters. While the first, titled Cave in, is centred on soft metal aluminium sculptures, the second, dubbed Clear cut, focuses on carved aluminium tube pieces. United by the practice’s distinctive design vocabulary, which brings a surrealist twist to the arena of contemporary design, the two arms of the exhibition offer up innovative, perception-altering statements on the nature of product and furniture design today, all funnelled through an eclectic merger of warped imagery and mid-century design sensibilities.

Founded by Saša Štucin and Nicholas Gardner, Soft Baroque’s work skirts the line between conceptual design objects and traditional furniture, blending functional conflicts with a strong aesthetic sense tempered by a drive for consumer appeal. Aligning with design principles that have defined eras and movements over the past century, the practice also delves into the domain of ideas, driven by the “plasticity of contemporary object media.” Tensions between foundational concepts in design and the absurdity of prominent products seen in the market today are a pivotal feature of their work, producing dreamlike, functional pieces that challenge convention.

The pair has described the niche in which these explorations take place as the realm of “plaything, perception, surface, and deception.” In the years since its founding, the practice’s work has been exhibited at Milan Design Week, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the 2022 Venice Biennale, Stockholm Design Week, Design Miami/Basel, Dubai Design Week, London Design Week, and Freeze for Frieze London. Working in disciplines that span photography, furniture and product design, as well as gadgets and other technological implements, the practice’s multifaceted body of work covers both two-dimensional digital design and three-dimensional objects, blending conceptual art and rudimentary design ventures to yield vibrant, thought-provoking results.

Labelled as a “semantic exploration of hardness and softness,” Cave in, the first chapter of the exhibition at Room 6x8, translates the aversion to 'hardness' or discomfort seen in contemporary consumer culture into physical form. The pieces constituting the series have been made from thick plates of aluminium, bent and cut to create the illusion of volume from a raw material that originally lacked it from every angle. In this vein, a series of everyday objects such as chairs, tables, cabinets, coffee tables, side tables, and lamps, fashioned from powder-coated aluminium plates, explore the perceived conflicts and possibilities involved in creating such pieces for the market.

Destruction and reconstruction, in this case, allow for a subversion of reality as perceived by consumers, providing a break from the familiar to engender new perspectives on the nature of conceptualising and making. The aluminium plates used to produce the collection have been deformed in every plane imaginable, yielding forms that evoke the bare essence of the products they are meant to serve, and yet, their profiles have been constructed in a way reminiscent of rough, artistic brush strokes, whose unbridled expression retains only a semblance of function. In fact, the aesthetic value of each piece shines above its attention to functionality, presenting an absurdist image of design in flux, morphing between different trajectories while attempting to accommodate them all in a melting pot of form, colour, and materiality.

Soft Baroque has likened the process of moulding the raw aluminium plates into their fully realised incarnations as a process of deconstructing the “rigidity” of the metal, thereby “softening” it till it begins to behave more like a complex organism. Through this procedure, borne of the product designers’ own imaginations, the ideas behind the creation of this series are intimately embedded into the varicoloured forms of the objects. Projections, peeling away from the surfaces of each piece produce a play between solid and void while adhering to the functional requirements demanded of them.

Plato’s Allegory of the cave and its observations on how one’s perception is affected by the quantum of information available to them for reference is another driving force behind the series. Comparing the process of entering and exiting the metaphorical cave to the dematerialisation of the aluminium through cutting, bending, and splitting, the new language produced by the practice’s choice to discard the standard processes of working with the material is said to have altered its nature and behaviour to a degree where the very introduction of the pieces into a space “in turn, sublimates the environment itself.”