Aligned Square Table – / By Maarten Baas – 70 X 70 Cm / Aluminium – Valerie Objects

“Maarten Baas is one of the leading figures in Dutch design. Iconoclastic, subversive and brimming with fantasy, his creations sit at the crux of art and design. These are theatrical décor elements for everyday life: humorous furnishings with a rebellious edge. Through his controversial experimental work, Maarten Baas overturns preconceived ideas. He has forged his own world, happily pushing the boundaries of design to show another reality made up of strangeness, optical effects, illusion, play. After having created a tableware collection for valerie_objects, this time, Maarten Baas brings his vision of outdoor furnishings to the table, with his “Aligned” collection. This collection of outdoor tables and chairs revels in the concept of us all having an inner child, hidden away deep inside us. These creations contain a huge dose of spontaneity and naivety, translating a human touch into mechanically-produced objects. “The starting point was similar for each object that I create: creating a piece of design which is entirely functional and which appears to be hand-drawn”, declared Baas. This way, Baas redefined outdoor furnishings, which are typically composed of metal frames and wooden slats, by designing the slats with pencil on paper, then by meticulously recreating them in reality using aluminium. “You can often find beauty in just a quick sketch”, he explained. However, these spontaneous lines are also lost amidst an industrial process. This is how Maarten Baas adds organic shapes and irregular lines into a world of design centred around straight lines. “Although the underlying idea may seem simple, production is far from it”, declares Baas. “Machines are truly gifted when it comes to creating straight lines. It’s much harder to produce a twisted line”. The result is “oh-so Maarten Baas”: a design which appears to have been imagined by a child… The heat-lacquered aluminium slats contain slightly irregular and asymmetrical lines, deliberately and unapologetically imperfect. This playful and naive spirit is further reinforced by the small, forward-pointing armrests, which have an air of an outstretched arm and which give the seating a charismatic charm.”