Here, we ask designers to take a selfie and give us an inside look at their life.
Bio: Lucas Simões, Visual Artist
Hometown: Catanduva, Brazil
Studio Location: São Paulo, Brazil
Describe what you make: I create sculptures and site-specific installations, and I like to explore how those ideas can spill over into functional design.
The most important thing you’ve designed to date: My work is always shifting—I try to avoid having a single, easily recognizable aesthetic. Some investigations grow from the same root but take very different forms, and in a way, that’s my biggest goal: to keep it alive and unpredictable. In terms of site-specific installations, though, I’d say Ressaca at Casa Triângulo and Enclosed Dimension at Pivô, both in São Paulo, stand out. They were the ones I had the most fun creating, and where the public really connected with the work.
Describe the problem your work solves: I’m not sure I “solve” problems so much as create them. I like making cracks in solid ideas—things we take for granted, like what development means or how we imagine utopias. I’m drawn to that fragile balance where life feels like it could tip either way—that’s where the tension is, and that’s where creativity lives.
Describe the project that you are working on now: September is a busy month. I’m opening “Lightness & Tension” at Christie’s in LA with Ulysses de Santi, where I’ll show my first functional design pieces alongside Joaquim Tenreiro’s furniture—which is exciting because it brings together two very different design practices. Right after that, I head
to Austin for my solo show Luscofusco at Lora Reynolds Gallery, with a new series of sculptures that rethink the aesthetic codes of modernist architecture and how their meanings have shifted over time.
A new or forthcoming project we should know about: Next year I’m working on a project that merges the possibilities of sculpture and functional design in a site-specific installation.
What you absolutely have to have in your studio: Daylight, coffee, and books. The studio’s in a pretty intense part of town, full of clashing energies, so inside we try to build the opposite—something calm, fun and focused.
What you do when you’re not working: Running keeps me sane—either before or after the studio. Otherwise, I’m usually at home in my library, reading, sketching, or listening to music. Friends and drinks are a constant—those nights of long conversations are as important as studio time. And because of work I travel a lot, so I always use that as a chance to experience new places in ways that shift my perspective.
Sources of creative envy (dead or alive): Anne Carson for her brilliance with language. Andrei Tarkovsky for his ability to turn time into poetry.
The distraction you want to eliminate: I’d love to cut down on all the business-related bureaucracy of production—and definitely spend less time staring at screens.
Concrete or marble? Both
High-Rise or Townhouse? High Rise
Remember or Forget? Remember, but I keep forgetting
Aliens or Ghosts? Aliens
Dark or Light? Dark
