Duccio Maria Gambi strips back and celebrates material through 'Subtraction'

Italian designer Duccio Maria Gambi's works display an inherent understanding of materiality. Stripped, raw surfaces with smooth marble finishes showcase his mastered restraint and fascination with the architectonics of the materials that create product designs. Captivated by the process of transformation, Gambi takes a multivalent approach to his practice, guided by his education in interior design from Milan and workshops and residencies in Rotterdam and Paris. The Florence-based designer's portfolio ranges from custom-made furniture for private clients to unique research projects for design galleries and site-specific interventions, with some of his designs now part of the permanent collection at the Triennale Design Museum. Through his studio, the furniture designer pursues a vocabulary of simple lines and hefty forms, employing both industrial and crafted techniques.

In his latest series of works, Subtraction, this negotiation of the material and tension between materiality and form translates into sculptures, furniture pieces and even scenographies that are inspired by the fundamental process of sculpture making—the manipulation of matter through subtraction. Beginning with one particular material, the process behind the sculptural designs transforms them; "What was one material becomes a work composed of two different ones," Gambi shares in a conversation with STIR.

Explaining the ethos of the ongoing series, he elaborates, "Subtraction is a standard process in sculpture; it is 'The Process'. Using this name for the group of works has two different reasons. The first one is immediately highlighting and giving importance to the process I used and linking it to [sculpture making], and the second is because [the name] contrasts with the overall appearance of the works."

The works in the Subtraction series depict this duality succinctly. The pieces are hefty, but the stripped sections that reveal the interior materials make them feel impermanent. The different components, seemingly glued together but made of one block, also reveal references to the urban landscape, as Gambi has previously noted. The use of colour, texture and even the clean linearity of some of the works distinguishes them. As the contemporary designer notes, the idea is to "render these two entities by giving them different aesthetics. Leaving the surface as it is and sculpting the mass with a completely different approach to give a new identity to it."

The process not only entails chiselling, hacking and working into a given block but also the subtle integration of colour and the right texture given a certain material. For the series, Gambi has experimented with a panoply of different choices, achieving a range of different appearances. He recounts to STIR, "The series began as an evolution of another collection where, before sculpting a granite block, I was adding a plastic laminate surface to it. I realised that I already had a surface—the surface of the block—and I could exalt it and underline its essence by subtracting it from the rest of the block."

With this discovery, Gambi used the technique on marble, which, as he explains, allowed him to create a distinguished vocabulary for the sculptures. The Italian designer then shifted to experimenting with industrial wooden sheets, as he mentioned in the exclusive conversation. "I was fascinated by trying to apply a sculpting and subtractive process to materials that are made and used only by cutting and filling, and was interested to discover how these materials could reveal very interesting textures, in another sense, how the volume of these materials could be expressed," he notes.

From material such as plywood, Gambi moved on to polystyrene, something he is familiar with, having worked with it in previous collections. Finally, Gambi explored the possibilities presented by natural wood for the pieces. He shares, "In this last evolution, I feel [a different challenge] because the natural element—their unity is disintegrated—and the natural branches appear in the end like they are fixed on this artificial mass."

The idea, as much as to deceive the eye into considering two volumes fused together, is also to understand the inherent beauty of certain materials. As Gambi elaborates, "Through this process of being separated, something that I think happens in all the works of the series, the eye can concentrate on [individual elements and] the beauty of their shapes. It is, in the end, a way to underline and exalt the beauty of certain details."

In this way, the pieces in the ongoing Subtraction series indicate Gambi's ongoing interest in materiality. "I'm fascinated by the separation between matter and material," he tells STIR. "For me, matter is something before it becomes useful for a production process. A material is something that is already [introduced] into that intellectual process of transformation. I like to think that through my work, I'm trying to exalt the matter in itself, to stop myself before it becomes a material, to add a subtle lens, a language, to underline its beauty for how it appears in my eyes."

Matter and material are separated by that very process of becoming that Gambi outlines, apparent in the raw, sinewy aesthetic of the works. They are symmetrical as much as they are irregular, refined as much as they are roughened. The abstractions are as much a dialogue between what has been removed and what remains as they are reminders of the process of creation. As Gambi notes in conclusion, "I often try to couple materials that enter in a dialogue, [such as] natural and artificial, thus hoping that the artificial serves as a link or a message for the natural to be understood. I'm obsessed with the inner and hidden beauty of things. I'm very receptive to it and try to transmit it, be that a natural block of stone or a leftover and discarded material."