Hugo França

Working in the same tradition as modernist Brazilian masters, Hugo França (b. 1954) is best known for his reverential use of raw Brazilian hardwoods. Working exclusively with fallen and dead trees and old canoes he purchases from the Pataxó Indian tribes in Bahia, França creates unique designs that showcase the beauty of these natural materials. His work is extremely labor-intensive as he favors the use of Pequi, a gigantic oleaginous tree, which averages 45 meters (approximately 148 feet) in height and 2 meters (approximately 7 feet) in girth. The high oil content of the Pequi wood makes it useless to industrial clear-cutters and they often leave them behind after taking out an entire forest. França gives the felled trees a second life in his exquisite, massively scaled furniture and sculptures.

França manually crafts each piece he designs, sometimes opening grooves in the wood to expose features that the material is unable to express on its own, other times carving it down it to rediscover curves that highlight the tree's natural organic forms.

After studying industrial engineering at the university in his hometown Porto Alegre (RS) in Brazil, and working briefly at a computer company in the early 1980s, França moved to the Atlantic forest in northeastern Brazil in Bahia. There, he spent fifteen years living and working among the Indian tribes who taught him their generations-old woodworking techniques. He now works primarily out of his atelier in São Paulo, but makes a trip several times a year into the fishing village of Trancoso in Bahia where he maintains a studio and works with locals to source fallen trees to repurpose for his designs.