20.10.2012
Little seat Arepitas

Ethel Leon

The designer Pedro Useche revisits his own production. At the beginning of its activities, his furniture design was almost sculptural, without any concern for cost savings and other restraints of industrial design.

Now, with many years of practice and the sight of industrial design, he returns years back to his shapes and remakes them, with the expertise of those who have already mastered the world of the great series.

It is the recent case of the little seat Arepitas. Useche comments: "The proposal uses the back of my first chair, Mulher, with the difference that the disks have movement by the use of rubber rings (used in car bumpers) between the disks and the metal structure." The construction process is efficient, with laser cutting, bending on press and wood turning.

Inviting, with the seat composed of three disks, the roundness repeated also in massive feet and with a metal structure almost like a bone that holds the 'muscles', the seat is organic, not because it rounded, but because it is almost a negative, a countermold of our body.

Arepitas, moreover, are dumplings made of corn flour, very popular in Venezuela, Useche's homeland. If in the chair Mulher, the body was the motto of the design, in surrealist perspective, in this seat, the body is not the theme, but the motif

Unlike many designers who would like to enter the museums and gain an aura of artists, Useche does the other way, on behalf of mass production and quality.

Source: Agitprop - Revista Brasileira de Design