"Ceramic CHAIR #2" 2024 by Giovanni Leonardo Bassan

Giovanni Leonardo Bassan began working with ceramics in 2021. His entry into ceramics coincided with a major collaboration with Comme des Garçons, who invited him to create a new advertising concept and a full installation for their perfume collection. For this project, Bassan began sculpting what would become a signature motif in his work - totemic hands. Hands, as symbols, have long held a central place in his artistic language. Growing up in Italy, a culture where hands play a powerful role in communication, Bassan became fascinated with the ways gestures convey meaning; how people offer, receive, or hold objects. For him, hands are a form of silent language, deeply expressive and culturally resonant.

Following his collaboration with Comme des Garçons, Bassan exhibited seven of these ceramic hand totems at the White Cube Gallery in Paris. Over time, this body of work has grown to include over twenty ceramic hands. However, the two chairs currently displayed at Studio Oliver Gustav mark a significant evolution in his practice - his first time translating his ceramic vocabulary into functional furniture.

For this new work, Bassan turned to his own family history. On his mother’s side, his family has been in the furniture business for four generations, and his grandfather was a designer in the 1960s. The two chairs he has created are reinterpretations of original designs from that family archive. He transported the chairs from Italy to his Paris atelier, where he completely deconstructed them. By deconstructing the chairs and preserving only the metal tubular skeletons, he reimagined their forms entirely in ceramic.

Using hand-molded ceramic forms that resemble organic totems, the lines of the original chairs have been transformed into something more fluid and intuitive, shaped in conversation with the surrounding space. The brown-toned glaze, custom-developed by Bassan, accentuates the earthy texture of the ceramic, while sculpted hands emerge from the backrests, linking these pieces to his ongoing exploration of gesture and meaning.

As a final touch, the seats are covered in vintage French army blankets, materials also used in Rick Owens furniture - bringing a raw, tactile softness to the solid ceramic structure. These chairs were first shown at Galerie Sultana in Paris and are now on view at Studio Oliver Gustav.