The Vision Within The Man

Looking back to shape the future

Grounded in direct experience, a lifestyle all its own, an aesthetic embracing the without from the within: it is the anthem of modern design in upscale furniture that can be found in celebrity mansions and high-profile residences.  Not aspirations towards personal statement or expression, such works are at once solemn and spontaneous, planned by man and crafted by nature.  Thus the utilitarian ethos is revealed in spite of the strictest prohibitions against schools of thought and their theories.  Thus are frivolities presented to untutored eyes and sensibilities as the subtlety of its own materials imbue the noblest elegance – which is to say, the most prescient of silences – to a piece honestly crafted, without thought of accolade or recompense.

And so a reaction, or, even, a comeback, where traditional skills had been shunned and modernity is identified with the machine, a comeback of the ancient, almost-stoic ethic identifying being with doing.  And thus there can be no theory of design and no “movement” in the arts, for such terms belong to metacognition, not the mighty and mysterious context that is the great human unconscious.  And so truly spontaneous furniture, like calligraphy, must arise out of its materials and cannot be merely assembled of them.  And thus such an art can only be learned, never taught.

“Art” is an ironic term for labeling the artifice involved in reinterpreting nature.  But even as the most cunning of acting skills can demonstrate a truth unattainable otherwise, so too might artists and artisans similarly reveal nature herself with the forms of man, regardless of the sophist’s objections.  In the event, civilization must be furnished.  Yet the return to tradition in contemporary design has found itself in the most modern of settings, sleek where nature had been thick, minimal where nature had expanded.  Ergo, the modern furniture maker, such as one Barlas Baylar, integrating contemporary society and the ancient secrets of village masters just doing their job.

A job well-done was the craft of these ancients.  And theirs was a world far removed from art criticism and revolving fashions.  It was one of pride of work and visions forever free from ossification by theory.  Intimately understanding themselves a part of the natural cycle, no distinction was made between nature’s discards and nature herself.  In our evermore crowded world where digital communications make neighbors too close and invite the government into our very beds, so-called folk art is a reminder and a triumph of the human spirit.  Or as George Nakashima wrote, “it might even be a question of regaining one's own soul when desire and megalomania are rampant – the beauty of simple things.”