MAARTEN BAAS’ GOTHIC BURNED FURNITURE.
I’m an interior design addict; I love spending a lazy afternoon in LA browsing furniture stores on Robertson and Melrose. However, it’s hard to find much that fits in with my Gothic Lolita aesthetic. And then I discovered young Dutch designer Maarten Baas. His “Smoke” collection of burned vintage furniture strikes a chord with me – not only in the provocative design, but also in his underlying philosophy.
Maarten Baas has been setting the design world on fire – quite literally. For his graduation show, Baas bought second-hand, Baroque-style furniture from Internet auctions. He covered the pieces in petrol, charred them with a blowtorch, and sealed the porous remains with layers of transparent epoxy. As you can see, the imagery is both striking and thought-provoking.
Baas explained his work as an exploration of the meaning of beauty. “I was thinking about why we want things to stay the same,” he said. “Why do we buy things and don’t touch them? Why do we think symmetry and smoothness are beautiful? And what would happen if we do the opposite of what we ought to do with furniture – if we burnt it?”
In a similar way, Gothic Lolita subverts existing notions of beauty. Morbid clothes and makeup can be lovely; destruction and violence can create something unexpectedly moving, such as the blood-splattered Gurololi featured in the previous post.
Baas is mildly defensive about his designs: “Sometimes people say it’s depressive. I don’t mean that at all. I really think they are nice.”
I think Gothic Lolitas can relate to that. Most of us aren’t gloomy individuals. We’re simply challenging the expression of beauty that others follow – and in the process, perhaps raising beauty to a different level.
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LA CARMINA
7 Comments
Love this stuff! Love the plastic chair and the smoke range is just genius!
I'm working on a project called Flaming Desks: http://www.flamingdesks.com/blog/about/ .. hopefully the desk I'm going to burn will look as good as this!
I did a blog post about Maartin.. on there too!
Love this stuff! Love the plastic chair and the smoke range is just genius!
I’m working on a project called Flaming Desks: http://www.flamingdesks.com/blog/about/ .. hopefully the desk I’m going to burn will look as good as this!
I did a blog post about Maartin.. on there too!
Oh that’s awesome! I like your graphic design work.
Oh that's awesome! I like your graphic design work.
uuuuhhh, sexy
uuuuhhh, sexy
uuuuhhh, sexy