Escape Bench ‘Utah’, Sand, Glass and Black Silica by Fernando Mastrangelo

Fernando Mastrangelo uses atypically commonplace materials – such as salt, coffee, sand, glass and cement – to cast sculptural objects that inextricably entangle fine art and design disciplines. Amalgamating commodity materials and pure geometric form, the works are intriguingly contradictory; they are both rugged and refined, durable and delicate, formal and functional. Precisely because of their hybrid natures, each work shatters the potential for contextual singularity. Instead, these free-standing and wall-hanging sculptural pieces resonate across a panoramic, multidisciplinary spectrum – spanning formal, social, historical, mathematical, and even religious subject matters. Mastrangelo enlists an unrelentingly fastidious fabrication process to achieve these liminal harmonies, through which he is able to expand our experience of everyday materials, granting them an otherwise unnoticed cutting-edge, sophisticated minimalism.