Carwan Gallery is pleased to present a new collaboration with Italian designer Roberto Sironi, in the form of a collection of sculptural marble furniture created in dialogue with Italian marble editor Palmalisa Zantedeschi. Titled Aphanès, the collection marks a new direction in Sironi’s formal language, all the while expanding on topics that have been present throughout his previous work, such as the history of architecture, a research-based methodology, and a fascination with ancient and prehistoric material culture.

Drawing inspiration from Stone Age megalithic architecture, Aphanès deploys the simplicity of structural archetypes in order to expose the richness of the material, namely an extremely limited reserve of rare marble featuring exquisite patterns and colours. It is a novel body of work that continues the designer’s research-based approach, also evident in RUINS (the first Carwan commission by the designer, developed between 2018-2021), where he researched industrial and classical architectural remains from the Mediterranean to create assemblages of their fragments. In Aphanès, he goes further back in time, to the very beginnings of human aspirational building culture. The design objects that form the Aphanès collection are reminiscent of dolmen (prehistoric stone-table structures), evoking an aura of ritual and mystery, all the while sparking a visual short circuit, as their minimalist forms contrast the vibrant surface of the marble.

At the heart of the project lies a reverence for the material itself: the two selected stones were extracted decades ago from quarries that are no longer active, without any certain information about their geographical origin. The material’s most prominent feature is of course its extraordinary internal structure that, with the appropriate cutting and finishing, reveals exquisite patterns and shapes in an arresting kaleidoscope of yellows, greens, and purples. All objects part of the Aphanès collection are handmade near Verona, in Italy’s leading marble region, using custom finishing by hand for each object, in order to highlight the details of the material itself and to expose the beauty that is hidden inside the stone.

This process of revealing what is hidden within the stone lends the project its title, with aphanès being an Ancient Greek word meaning that which does not appear, something hidden. In that sense, the design process becomes one of exposing the ‘nude nature’ of the stone, with an emphasis on allowing what nature has formed over millions of years, to show. The result of more than two years of research and careful work with the available material, Aphanès respects the original formation process of these stones, with the understanding that their intricate patterns are a visual documentation of the history of the earth itself. Through these micro-megalithic meditations, Roberto Sironi expands his years-long interest in matter-research and its archeological approach into a new visual and formal language.

The collection Aphanès comprises a bench, side tables, coffee tables and low tables, a console and a desk — all cut from blocks of rare marble in super-limited editions.