MAS CREATIONS collection by Masquespacio at the FORMS & TEXTURES exhibition in Milan – Photo by Gregg Abbate.

Design – Spanish creative duo Masquespacio presents its first solo exhibition at Isola Design Festival during Milan Design Week. Titled Form & Texture, the showcase presents the Mas Creations collection responding to challenging questions. Who is responsible for defining an object as an artwork or a design? Is functionality making an object a design? Or is the story making it an artistic interpretation? Can art be functional? Can design be dis-functional?

• RELATED STORIES: Discover more about Milan Design Week 2022 on Archipanic…

From here, the studio created a decaying furniture collection. At first sight, you can read it as a chair, a lamp or a room divider. Yet, due to its unusual and uncomfortable forms, it becomes clear that we are not speaking about a functional design object. Is it art or design?

“That is the big question we have been having for a long time and we want to reflect upon it.” Masquespacio co-founders Ana Milena Hernández Palacios and Christophe Penasse told Archipanic. “We see ourselves as much more than just designers, although we are labeled like it because it is how our studio started. Indeed, when we create a chair with sculptural forms, we don’t see it as a chair, but since it has a functional part, it is labeled as a design. Instead, we definitely think of it as an artwork.”

“Since the first day we visited the design week, we always dreamt of having our solo exhibition. Now for this edition, we just planned to go solo to showcase our vision through our Mas Creations collection and go a bit further with our experiment. We didn’t focus on a collection of objects but made it more of a reflection through the objects presented in the space.”

Following our reflection about “The boundaries between Design & Art,” we wanted to start the creation process of the collection, changing our way of developing an artwork. Hereby instead of designing the different elements digitally in 3D as we always do, we decided to initiate the creation process using a pencil and a paper.

The different designs were developed from a 2D point of view and later converted into 3D printed objects as part of the process where tradition and technology come together, questioning analogic and digital techniques in design and art. Mas Creations was developed in collaboration with Iberpoligraph and Tarkett.

All photos of Form & Texture are by Greg Abbate.

• RELATED STORIES: Archipanic loves Masquespacio. Find out more about their projects.