COLORADO CABINET BY BENJAMIN FOUCAUD

For his first exclusive work with STUDIOTWENTYSEVEN, Benjamin Foucaud returns to a seminal and almost virgin gesture, one that echoes the earliest stories of how a world comes into being

Colorado imagines a landscape arranged by a giant hand, trunks and branches laid beside stones and reliefs as if gravity itself were still being negotiated. There is something playful in this origin story, a joyful vocabulary of forms that feels less designed than discovered, as though the piece had simply grown into its shape and been left where it fell. Hand carved in solid French oak, the cabinet sets raw, honey-toned wood against passages treated in white pigmented linseed oil, so that timber and stone read as a single continuous material, one softening into the other

Its legs bend and bulge like branch and root, planted close to the ground and to the earth’s own logic. The tall panels above carry a different weathering, split down the center like rock cleaved in two, crowned by a soft, sun-like arc of oak left bare. Foucaud shapes every contour by hand, using age-old tools, spokeshaves and drawknives, to carve reliefs and silhouettes that resist repetition, so that no two curves arrive at quite the same conclusion

Handcrafted in France, this piece is built on restraint of technology and abundance of touch, where the hand and the imagination do the work that machines cannot