Back in the 1500s, Venetian glassmakers came up with a way to make flat mirrors. With them they spread the magic of reflective surfaces that give us back our image and that of nearby objects. Today the mirror is a common element in houses that also has the virtue of spreading light and visually expanding the space. Since our time, we have known it associated mainly with the framework that delimits it, transforming to the beat of times and styles. Although behind the mirror there is much more.
Its history dates back to 8,000 years ago, when the first polished obsidian stone was made. It is there that Sofia Lagerkvist and Anna Lindgren from the Swedish studio Front Design have traveled. His Seven Stories About Mirrors collection, presented at Galerie Kreo, comprises seven pieces, each representing a key step in his development. "From chiseled stone and sand grinding to the discovery of metal and the invention of glass blowing, perfecting the techniques was a process that took thousands of years," they point out.
For Front Design –recent guests of honor at the last edition of the Stockholm Furniture Fair– the history of mirrors mixes magic, illusions, vanity and power. But it also involves the first social protections for workers, psychology, poetry, art and self-awareness. !Almost nothing! The evolution of the mirror led to a search for the brightest and most accurate reflection possible. Until going from being an exclusive object to becoming a regular in our daily lives.
“We were interested in following its development and understanding how an object transforms its function, value, and status,” Lagerkvist and Lindgren point out. Thus, they move from the most natural mirror, the sheet of water, to the reflection vases, going through different periods and cultures. To create the Reflexion de agua table, they scanned the shape of a puddle in the forest and poured molten glass into a sand-bedded mold to produce it. The surface tension of the glass creates soft ripples that resemble reflections in a still pool of water.
His obsidian mirror travels to Çatalhöyük, Anatolia (Turkey), where what is considered the oldest known specimen, created around 8,000 years ago, was found. In dialogue with the archaeologists from the University of Cambridge who led the excavations at Çatalhöyük, Front replicated this by chiseling the obsidian and polishing it with clay and water, without using modern tools. With the addition of a silver setting, they have turned it into a precious stone.
Of the Chinese bronze mirrors, from 2000 BC, the beautiful contours and the reverses decorated with mythological or personal inscriptions stand out. Symbol of wealth in ancient China, they were attached to the owner's clothing with a ribbon. Front has fitted its wall mirror with intricate handmade rope and tinted the glass in the warm shade of bronze. For ancient metal specimens were subject to scratches and irregularities, and the mirrored surface needed to be polished every day. The bronze frame is a manufacture of the Marinelli Bell Foundry. Italian workshop in Agnone, founded in 1339, which is still in the hands of the Marinelli family.
With the Convex Mirror Vase, the Swedish creators narrate the production technique of the first glass mirrors in ancient Rome. A lens-shaped piece was cut from the surface of a blown glass globe. The disc, coated with lead on the reverse, created a convex mirror with a bright but distorted reflection. Then came the flat glass.
But the great turning point came in 15th century Venice, where it was brought to perfection. They remember from Front how the glass craftsmen were transferred to the island of Murano to keep the secret of their trade, away from foreign spies. The French King Louis XIV persuaded some of them to go to Paris and share knowledge. At the end of the 17th century, Gerolamo Barbini contributed to the realization of the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles. The Barbini family still makes mirrors in Murano, and Front has chosen them to make his Secret Mirror a reality.
Fascinated by magic and play, Lagerkvist and Lindgren apply trompe-l'oeil in reflection vases that are defined by changing from place to place and reflecting the room in which they are placed. So the images that we see in its design, which appear at first glance to be reflections, are actually embedded in the thickness of the glass using the Grail glass technique. They are perennial reflections of the past in this vase.
The optical illusion presides over another recent Front Design collection. Presented in the installation Designed by Nature, they have developed it in collaboration with the Italian firm Moroso. The furnishings are recreations of fragments of a wooded landscape: moss-covered rocks or mounds that propose spaces for the human body to occupy, just as one is able to find when hiking in the mountains.
According to Sofia Lagerkvist, "we wanted the pieces to feel like someone had lifted up an entire clearing in a forest with a giant shovel and moved it into a house." Anna Lindgren adds: “We document these places using different techniques, both high-tech and traditional. We wanted to collect both the dimensions and physical properties, as well as the experience and atmosphere of nature. We put together a lot of paintings and drawings, and 3D-scanned entire areas in different natural settings, which we used to create the furniture.”
The textiles used are a fundamental chapter of the project and have had the collaboration of the prestigious Danish upholstery firm Kvadrat. These are knitted fabrics as customized tapestries, which adapt to different three-dimensional shapes. With this project, the co-founders of Front want to highlight the essential human contact with nature and the positive effects on physical and mental health. Also, the cultural and psychological significance of natural environments, especially in his native Sweden.
