04.18.17
Sighted
In This Designer’s Hands, Recycled Leather Becomes Something Undeniably Cool
Continuing with a self-produced material he calls Structural Skin, Madrid-based designer Jorge Penadés has turned his exploration of recycled leather waste into a sleek collection of mirrors and table lamps, on display earlier this month at the Rossana Orlandi gallery in Milan. Penadés gets the leather offcuts for his pieces from Hermès, which means the color palettes become a kind of artistic constraint — and yet, the shredded leather, combined with resin to create a reconstituted material, is undeniably cool, resembling marble or a particularly colorful particleboard. This new set of simple mirrors and lamps with bold, intersecting planes comes in a selection of vibrating reds and corals and softer greens and yellows. The collection is quite the result of a newfangled kind of recycling.