Pilão armchair

The Pilão armchair is one of the defining works of José Zanine Caldas’s sculptural period. He made it in the 1970s in his workshop at Nova Viçosa, on the coast of Bahia. Its name means “pestle” in Portuguese and refers to the wooden mortar of Brazilian vernacular tradition, a vessel hollowed out of a single trunk to pound grain. Caldas carved the chair the same way, from one solid block of native hardwood, so that seat, back and arms form a single continuous mass that keeps the natural contours of the tree. The Pilão belongs to his Denúncia (Denunciation) work, which used trees felled or left behind by the deforestation of Brazil’s Atlantic Forest. Each chair is therefore unique: part furniture, part sculpture, and part an early statement of ecological protest.