DARK SKÁPTŌ, nature has a heart of gold.

Inspiration is always waiting where you least expect it: so say the creatives who flee monotony and so teach the visionaries whose insatiable minds investigate nature and biology, always finding something unprecedented and exciting. So it is such a rare but timeless process – the fossilisation of trees – triggered an ambitious design project that echoes the workings of nature and seeks out their true essence. Time, clay and sand, elements that have powerfully shaped life over the ages, become modular concentric rings with a gold leaf overlay protected by a transparent resin covering. Dark Skaptō is more than just an imposing table with overlapping gold veins: it is a veritable work of art, to the extent that art is beauty. The project was conceived by Paolo Criveller, founder of CrivéStudio, an architecture and design studio near Treviso that specialises in works of internal design, which subvert and take to extremes the principles of architecture even as it preserves a special awareness of landscapes, history and urban planning. These are the marks of distinction that the team led by Paolo implements wisely and skilfully as it faces projects challenging the limits of art and technique integrating the important lessons gleaned from their advanced investigation of aesthetics. Dark Skaptō is a table made with gold leaf, stone and transparent resin. In a fitting role for an item that represents togetherness, at Marmomac 2019 it reunited Paolo Criveller, Giuseppe Gennaro (head of design at Crivéstudio), Eleonora Menegazzo from the company Mario Berta Battiloro gold leaf supplier, Matteo Generelli, the stonemason who created the work and Raphaël Prati, Biesse Marketing & Communications Director. 

A meeting point and source of common ground, Dark Skaptō is the emblem of perpetual genesis, a hypnotic circle that gives life to everything. The table was designed by reshaping the concept of the tree trunk and offering a new interpretation of the classic concentric structure of tree rings: a design knowingly crafted by nature to mark the passage of time. Criveller offers his insight on the process: “Our celebration of time and the decision to select a tree trunk to represent life went hand in hand: after all, it is time that drives the process of fossilisation and preserves the tree. For this project, we started by observing nature first and later worked on ways to industrialise the piece, to make it less expensive without sacrificing its uniqueness. We took a work of art and made it modular and reproducible.” Nature and technology, two inseparable words, set the groundwork for a cyclical process that spans across materials, as Prati explains: “For us, for Biesse and Intermac, the table represents a grand synthesis: Intermac technology was produced by taking Biesse's technology principles for processing wood, copying them and adapting them to the properties of stone. Now we are celebrating wood by processing stone, thanks to an object that is both unique and reproducible.”