For nearly a decade, the Turin-based Italian design collective Nucleo has been transforming epoxy resin—better known for its industrial applications, such as coating floors and building aerospace parts—into sophisticated, original furniture. This week at Design Miami/Basel, at the booth of Cologne, Germany–based Ammann Gallery, Nucleo presented new works from its "Souvenirs of the Last Century" series—simple wood furniture encased in solid blocks of gleaming golden resin, like insects trapped in amber—and stools from its stunning new "Jade" series, which pushes the collective’s cast-resin practice and interest in ancient materials in a new direction.
For the "Jade" works, Nucleo director Piergiorgio Robino submerged organic material (in this case logs cut from a 200-year-old Italian oak tree) in the liquid polymer as he’s done in the past. But this time, instead of leaving it clear, he added pigment. The resulting hunks of verdant resin are both raw and refined, and have a certain amount of light-catching glitz. They suggest mineral deposits deep within the earth while still retaining a sense of high design.
The stools are block-cut to resemble slabs of a kind of marble you’d never see in nature, explains Robino, adding that he first began working with resin because it was largely untapped as a medium. "It’s not a fine material, and many people don’t like to work with it," he says. One problem is that it hardens rather quickly. "There is no guidebook for it, but that also means there is a lot of opportunity to be really creative."
One of the few artistic precedents is the work of sculptor John McCracken, who began using the potent industrial substance in the 1960s because it was cheap and available and allowed him to create perfect, minimalist surfaces. Nucleo’s pieces are much more about the imperfections—bubbles, fissures, ruptures—that form as the liquid dries around the wood. As those little openings naturally appear in the hardened material, more resin is poured into the mold to create layers and patterns. "It’s a process of experimentation, and each time we discover new things about the resin no one has ever known," says Robino. "The company that supplies it is even amazed at what it can do."
