There is a family story that Jorge Penadés (Málaga, 1985) tells to explain that he came up with the rebound design. In the 1920s, his Valencian great-grandfather emigrated to Morocco to export horses. The cosmopolitan atmosphere of the then French protectorate encouraged him to recover his previous profession, furniture. “He set up a joinery and it went so well that he started working for the royal house in Morocco. And that's like working for a gallery: they never pay you, but thanks to that other orders come ”, he explains. After the independence of Morocco, the family returned to Spain and, with the money they had managed to bring, they opened a bar in Malaga. “My father came to Spain when he was 17 years old. It was the sixties. Torremolinos, the Swedes, all that. Interest in carpentry? Zero".
In the last five years, Penadés has become one of those names that arise in any conversation, national or international, in which new Spanish design is spoken of. His creative use of leather and elements from DIY and hardware has led him to show his work alone, to collaborate with Camper - he has just built his new store in Malaga out of disused commercial furniture - and to produce pieces with BD Barcelona. His work is exhibited internationally, is studied in schools, is in magazines and also on Instagram. In a time of ecological crisis and global consumption, his claim that design can survive and innovate without the need for huge budgets or highly sophisticated materials has penetrated the sector like a hot knife in butter. His most famous project, and which caught the attention of the luxury giant Hermès, is a material made with waste from Moroccan crafts: leather shavings that, precisely pressed, can be used to build very diverse objects.
In summary, Penadés is a figure of design. Even though in his adolescence he looked more like a hedonist dazzled by the bling bling of the Costa del Sol than his hardworking cabinetmaker grandfather. "I had a rogue, rebellious profile," he says. He stopped studying at 17. “It was the bubble years, my friends worked, they bought brand clothes, cars… so I went to work. I wasn't interested in design. I liked going out and I wanted to be a footballer ”. After several works –among them, in an architecture studio in Puerto Banús–, Penadés ended up at an interior design school in Barcelona and, thanks to a scholarship, in Eindhoven (Netherlands), one of the author's design capitals . There, in an atmosphere marked by the prestigious Design Academy and figures such as his compatriot Nacho Carbonell, he learned the lesson: "In Spain they teach us to work for others, and in Holland they also teach us to work for yourself."
Resigned to not being able to afford the expensive enrollment of the Dutch school, he returned to Spain and applied for a scholarship at the IED. They gave it to him thanks to the dossier he presented, the Structural Skin embryo, his project based on recycled leather that had arisen from him observing his father's love for leather goods, curiously the only man in the family line immune to the furniture virus. In the end, by the most remote path, Penadés was discovering at 30 that, if what interested him was not design, at least it was very similar. "The design world is dominated by lobbies, " he says, "and getting into it is very difficult." Mention prohibitive schools, circles of influence, galleries. Still, he tried. “I studied the trajectory of people I admired, what their steps had been. There were elements in common, especially competitions and residences, and I realized that, even without money, I could introduce myself to them. So I introduced myself to everyone. ”
In 2016, the Milanese gallery owner Rossana Orlandi signed him. He then exhibited in different groups until reaching his first individual, in 2018, at the Machado / Muñoz gallery in Madrid (where he is part of a cast of heavyweights such as Michael Anastassiades). “It was an incredible opportunity. I could not have made that exposition. Normally the production of an individual is half-financed between artist and gallery, as are the profits. I did not have the 10,000 euros that I should have contributed in any other gallery. Despite this, it was done. ” From his successive dribbles over the top of the collectible design , Penadés left with the conviction that, possibly, his place was somewhere else. "Contemporary design is elitist," he says. “To succeed in it you have to be able to afford to spend ten years without earning a penny. There is a design bubble for designers. I'm not saying this as pejorative, because I love seeing it, but it doesn't go with me. Creativity requires time and resources. If you have a lot of time and a lot of money, you have to be very silly not to do something interesting. My mission is to show that you can also survive in this by coming from a humble, normal and ordinary family ”.
His recent work is an attempt to "de-standardize the standardized." In other words, underline the design potential of apparently trivial objects such as profiles, screws, brackets, supports, anchors. "They are very intelligent objects, exceptional pieces that we don't know who designed", he points out. "I try to underline that genius. Rethink what already exists. Go beyond its function ”. For example, his vases, like the ones he made with aluminum profiles for BD Barcelona, or Gold-ish, a construction of gold-plated metal brackets destined for an exhibition in this year's Melbourne design week. Another of his projects, Extraperlo, is an annual fair in Madrid in which designers and professionals in the sector contribute reduced objects both in size - maximum a shoe box - and in price - no more than 500 euros. A nod, in a way, to Penadés who, when he exhibited in 2018, could not afford to buy any of his own pieces. It doesn't weigh him down, he clarifies. The important thing is that he has been living from his work for five years and that last year he was a father. "The life I lead I take as a gift."
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