Soft Metal Coffee Table by Soft Baroque

SOFT BAROQUE  Soft Metal Coffee Table, 2026

The Soft Metal Coffee Table belongs to Soft Baroque’s ongoing series translating forms historically carved from wood into folded and assembled sheet metal. Across the series – shelves, lights, smaller objects, the studio holds a deliberate distance between a silhouette borrowed from another century and the plain, industrial means of making it.

Each profile is a drawing of a furniture form rather than the form itself: an outline of a curve that, in timber, would have been carved in the round. The piece behaves as a trompe l’œil, a recognisable silhouette compressed to the depth of a sheet, presenting as object and as image of an object at the same time. The reference is one the studio makes explicitly: “we are also interested in the tradition of the trompe-l’œil: visual trickery that uses realistic imagery to create the optical illusions.”

Soft Baroque work from a revision of modernism’s two pillars of form and function, adding a third: surface. In their terms, surface is not decoration but the carrier of a piece’s cultural reference and its image-value  “critical to the production of value” even when it is only a few microns thick. The Soft Metal series operates squarely on that pillar. The carved wood lineage is delivered as silhouette, the means of making it is declared in flat sheet, plain finish and exposed fixings. As the critic Jeppe Ugelvig has written of the practice, Soft Baroque “investigates the use of trompe-l’œil in contemporary interior design, which, through the digitised appropriation of particular materials, triggers a confrontation of how we appreciate and consume commodities as and through surfaces.”

It is furniture made in awareness that the object will be met as an image before it is met in the room. Soft Metal builds the silhouette first, and lets function and material declare themselves plainly underneath.

Originally commissioned by the Museum of Architecture and Design (MAO), Ljubljana, in 2026, with support from the Centre for Creativity (CzK). Photo by Klemen Ilovar