Nacho Carbonell

Nominated Designer of the Future in Basel in 2009 at age 28, Nacho Carbonell was born in Valencia, Spain in 1980, and graduated with high honours from the Design Academy Eindhoven in 2007. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Fnac-Fonds national d’art contemporain, France, the Groninger Museum, Netherlands, the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal, Canada, and in the United States, the MoMA San Francisco, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Mint Museum.

‘Luciferase’ and ‘Time Is A Treasure’ are two collections exclusively produced for Galerie BSL. Each work is a unique, handmade piece. Nacho Carbonell breaks with all conventions to invent creatures with a communicative presence that can be immediately recognized as his own. The fruit of Nacho’s narrative intentions and experiments on materials, these works appeal to our imagination, sensitivity and ability to dream through their tenderness and their poetry.

‘Luciferase’ is Nacho Carbonell’s first work incorporating light. Born in 2011 and growing since, ‘Luciferase’ is a set of luminous organisms that surprise the viewer by their intriguing colors and textures. “The root of this word luciferase is ‘carrier of light’* and reflects the system used by flora and fauna living in the abyss, in the total obscurity found at greatest depths of the oceans. Even more than lights, I consider these pieces like creatures which glow with light.”

* Luciferase, Latin lux fero: photon-producing enzyme, present in the luminous organs of certain plants and animals.

The exterior soft, velvety materials of the ‘Luciferase’ works – silicone and resin mixed with sand, cork, plaster or metal dust – resemble the skin of an unknown species. The interior diaphanous and translucent textures take the shape of thorns, filaments and rocky surfaces. Some of them conjure up the translucent sparkle of fine stones such as amethyst, quartz or malachite; some the seductive eye of a predator from the great depths; and others the avid mouth of a carnivorous plant.

‘Time Is A Treasure’ is a family of zoomorphic clocks born in 2013. The starting point of this project: slices of blue agate, the interior of which was kept by French jewelry houses to create jewelry and clocks. Nacho Carbonell chose to reinstate these neglected stones with their own right to become clocks too, reinterpreting them in the light of his approach at the junction of mineralogy and genetic manipulation. “I was working with the idea of time. I had this concept already in mind about how we interpret time and how we look at time. We all have a ticking clock within us. I wanted to represent this idea by creating some creatures you could really look inside of and see their “time life”. So in the end the stones gave me the idea of what they wanted to be. Their frustration fuelled their desire. By imagining my own clocks, I wanted to reinstate them with what had been taken from them.”

The endearing creatures of ‘Time Is A Treasure’ maintain the balance of opposites which animates any work of nature. The main part of the body is in asperous burnished bronze. The blue agate head opens onto a golden, shining polished mirror interior which lights to up to reveal a concealed but distinctly ticking clock.