Nicolas Zanoni

Nicolas Zanoni (b. 1995, Paris) is a French designer who lives and works between Paris and Brussels. A multidisciplinary voice in the contemporary design, he cultivates an experimental practice at the intersection of design and sculpture. His work investigates direct acts of material transformation through raw, often unconventional processes, where accident and improvisation play a central role.

Zanoni’s objects are irregular, often unique, and instinctively shaped through encounters with his materials.Expressing a playful, sometimes subversive perspective on the manufactured objects that populate our daily lives. Working with industrially produced materials such as polystyrene and aluminium, he explores their physical limits: aluminium thread is woven, pressed or melted into tactile patterns, while polystyrene is stacked, melted, and reshaped into unexpected textures.

These time-consuming and labour-intensive methods, which he describes as forms of “trickery,” often yield results that appear organic, even volcanic. The works balance function and abstraction, sculpture and design, inviting tactile curiosity while challenging conventional categories. Series « On wheels » integrate elements borrowed from sports equipment, reflecting fragments of memory and highlighting Zanoni’s use of decontextualisation as a creative strategy.

Whether in chairs, lamps, side tables or shelves, his woven aluminium structures shimmer with an almost architectural presence, embodying both fragility and strength. By foregrounding the gesture of making, the endurance of the hand, and the intimate dialogue with material, Zanoni seeks to foster one-of-a-kind relationships between people and objects , where function becomes inseparable from play, memory, and touch.