LUCAS RECCHIA
DESIGNER
Lucas Recchia
Born in 1992 on an island in southern Brazil, designer Lucas Recchia began his career in 2018 with his first solo show for the avant-garde gallery Firma Casa in São Paulo and quickly caught the attention of the country’s art and design community. The first Brazilian designer to develop glass techniques in furniture design, Recchia seeks to explore glass as a fluid material, pairing ancient and handcrafted techniques with solar power, expanding its sustainable nature.
Recchia currently works in his atelier in downtown São Paulo, where he develops his new projects with a group of local artisans. He explores the feeling that the aesthetic of broken glass evokes in people – a feeling of simultaneous loss and transformation – bringing its malleability to the furniture scale. Keeping in step with his constant search to innovate, in 2019, Recchia began using solar power to fuse 100% of the glass used in his pieces.
With a recent focus on how to reuse traditional materials besides glass, such as bronze, aluminum, Brazilian granites, exotic quartzites and marble, Recchia brings together ancestral techniques with contemporary modeling methods to achieve organic designs highlighting the nuances of each material’s natural properties – earning him a spot on Forbes’s 2022 ‘30 Under 30’ list in Architecture & Design.
Recchia has developed commissioned pieces for architects such as Kelly Wearstler, Sig Bergamin, and Steven Harris; and pieces for Off-White and Louis Vuitton stores.
Born in 1992 on an island in southern Brazil, designer Lucas Recchia began his career in 2018 with his first solo show for the avant-garde gallery Firma Casa in São Paulo and quickly caught the attention of the country’s art and design community. The first Brazilian designer to develop glass techniques in furniture design, Recchia seeks to explore glass as a fluid material, pairing ancient and handcrafted techniques with solar power, expanding its sustainable nature.
Recchia currently works in his atelier in downtown São Paulo, where he develops his new projects with a group of local artisans. He explores the feeling that the aesthetic of broken glass evokes in people – a feeling of simultaneous loss and transformation – bringing its malleability to the furniture scale. Keeping in step with his constant search to innovate, in 2019, Recchia began using solar power to fuse 100% of the glass used in his pieces.
With a recent focus on how to reuse traditional materials besides glass, such as bronze, aluminum, Brazilian granites, exotic quartzites and marble, Recchia brings together ancestral techniques with contemporary modeling methods to achieve organic designs highlighting the nuances of each material’s natural properties – earning him a spot on Forbes’s 2022 ‘30 Under 30’ list in Architecture & Design.
Recchia has developed commissioned pieces for architects such as Kelly Wearstler, Sig Bergamin, and Steven Harris; and pieces for Off-White and Louis Vuitton stores.
EXHIBITIONS
Castorina Contemporary at Melbourne Design Week
On the occasion of NGV Melbourne Design Week 2023, Castorina invites visitors to experience ‘Contemporary,’ an exhibition of radical artists and designers working today across Europe and published worldwide, including Recchia of Studio Cas, Andrea Mancuso of Analogia Project, and Nucleo. In this exhibition, Studio Cas shows works from the ‘Morfa,’ ‘Bulle’ and ‘Janelas’ series.
"My purpose is to blur the boundaries between furniture and sculpture without focusing on the traditional modern Brazilian wood furniture, but instead on new shapes, textures and colors that modern technology can bring to ancient materials."
‘Limited Edition’ Collection at Rossana Orlandi Gallery
Recchia created his ‘Limited Edition’ collection in partnership with Rossana Orlandi Gallery, which began representing him in 2021.
For this collection, Recchia takes a deep dive into the use of glass and explores the feeling that the aesthetics of broken glass evokes in people: the feeling of both loss and transformation at the same time because a broken object goes from being, to becoming something else.
"I love Lucas Recchia. I like his use of materials, but especially the shapes he makes the materials he chooses for his pieces take. In his work there is not only creativity, but knowledge and research.”
Bossa Furniture Exhibition
Bossa Furniture collaborated with Recchia to create an online exhibition presenting his Morfa Series with pieces developed from 2019 to 2021.
The idea of glass as a sign of progress is not new; it was commercially imposed in the Portuguese government of the Brazilian colony in 1810. In 1851, it was presented as a revolutionary material at The Crystal Palace and is a crucial idea on Le Corbusier’s Five Points of Architecture and many posterior modernist buildings.
Recchia’s work brings a new approach to glass, featuring new techniques he developed with his team of artisans. Glass, already produced for millennia, is the substantial material in his designs, assuming structural function: fragile, texturized, and translucent, but also firm, heavy and organic.
"Sand, which was once rock, is now dune, which is now glass. Dune, but infinite sand grains waiting for time, waiting for wind. Time changes the way we see the world, it bends a straight line into a curve, it changes us, and this morph stands for the way I see the world."
‘Morfa Series’ Exhibition at Firma Casa
Recchia introduced his launch collection, ‘Morfa Series,’ at Firma Casa Gallery in Brazil.
Arising from the transitions between the various states of matter that glass assumes during the production process, Morfa is the name of the first furniture collection designed by Recchia for Firma Casa. The pieces, produced manually, are subjected to temperatures in excess of 800 degrees and without any type of containment, which gives a free form and makes each piece unique.
Attracted by Recchia’s works in glass, Sonia Diniz, the head of Firma Casa, a pioneering gallery in contemporary design in Brazil, invited him to develop a collection and launched his first solo show in 2019/2020.
“I see this capacity to transform as a metaphor of the essence of our times. It is my reading of the fleeting moment we are experiencing and the current meaning of beauty.”
DESIGN WORKS
“The material is finite and in constant transformation, which is the case of glass, which once was rock and then sand, finally became glass, it was used in a window pane or a drinking glass, and once broken, why not use it to make a table?”
LUCAS RECCHIA
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