Nick Valentijn Explores the Unpredictable Rawness of Metal
Briefly

Belgian designer Nick Valentijn creates twelve sculptural furniture pieces by hand, working primarily in metal and wood. He prioritizes materiality, allowing forms to emerge through a process that begins with quick, gestural one-line sketches and ends with immediate welding rather than measured plans or digital modeling. Thermal shifts, solder marks, deliberate seams and slight misalignments remain visible, becoming integral features. The work anthropomorphizes through organic shapes and heavy presences, transforming cabinets, seating and objects into familiar-yet-stretched forms. The practice values responsiveness and honesty over perfection, treating making as a conversation in which materials influence the outcome.
Created completely by hand, Valentijn holds materiality in high regard - allowing the form itself to be the subject, elements emerging into how they would like to be shaped, whatever that might be. Organic in a way that almost anthropomorphizes, these 12 pieces of sculptural furniture show the unpredictability of creating in metal, visible marks of joinery and solder on display, proudly announcing their arrival into the world.
For Valentijn, making is a kind of conversation with his materials. His early engagement with clay sharpened his ability to respond to the moment, a quality he now applies to wood and especially metal. Rather than bending the material entirely to his will, he allows it to influence the outcome - the shifting of steel under heat, the emergence of unexpected textures, the slight misalignments that become integral to the final form.
Read at Design Milk
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