Why We Live With Art

So the question of what earns that wall deserves more care than we usually give it. My answer has a few parts: what art does to the body, which kind of art belongs at the heart of a home, how to choose, and why we ended up with relief.

In the studios where homes are designed, one rule usually comes first: function, then aesthetics. I would only add one thing. Art in the home is a kind of function too.

Yet most of us buy art only to fill an empty spot at home, and a living space without that stir of feeling is no different from a temporary place to rest.

A sofa is for sitting and a lamp is for light. A work of art is for feeling. That function is just as real.

Our days are full of new technology, and the world around us keeps speeding up, pulling us away from our own feelings. The first reason we need art in our homes has to do with our mirror neurons.

Stand in front of an abstract work, or a sculpture, in a quiet room. Sometimes, out of nowhere, goosebumps rise, your heart beats faster, and there may even be tears. Our mirror neurons simulate the familiar things we already know to match what we see, and the body answers.

Art in the home is not only there to be looked at. It is a way to practice empathy, and to sit with the deepest, most hidden layers of human emotion. I believe art will push back against the indifference and the numbness of our industrial world.

On a slow afternoon, with the light moving across a wall, most of us already know the feeling: looking at art is relaxing. It is the second reason, and more than a saying.

When you take in a work of art you find beautiful, your brain responds much as it does when you are in love, as a 2011 study at University College London found. The moment a work moves you, blood rushes to the front of your brain and dopamine is released. At the same time, cortisol, the hormone behind our stress, begins to fall.

So art has a very concrete function: it lets us truly relax inside our own home, far from the tension of the day.

The third reason begins on our screens. On phones and computers, we scroll, read and listen all day, always trying to understand, always solving something. Art is not that quick, and not that easy.

A work has many layers and many meanings, and it does not hand you an answer right away. That uncertainty lets the mind put its problems down and wander. We drift back to old memories, think about who we are, and every so often a new idea arrives on its own.

For me, art at home is a pause button, and we need one. With the world changing as fast as it does, being truly moved has become rare.

Many years of work have taught me that a home holds several kinds of art. The first is decorative art: something placed into an empty space or a corner that needs it, to create the tight composition a designer wants. In studio practice, we usually handle this kind of art last, once all the furniture is in.

Interiors truly need art of this kind. Yet emotionally, we have almost no bond with it.

The second kind is emotional art. A work like this holds memories, and it holds the things you love at your core. Studios no longer see it as decor: it is the soul of the space, and we tend to design everything around it. This kind stirs the strongest feelings, because it is bound up with the identity of the viewer.

The third kind is investment art: art that grows in value over time, bought and kept as an asset. In fact, many works I painted with my own hand have doubled or tripled in value over the years. One thing is important: you will never know the price of a work I paint and make myself. The only prices you will see are those of the collections I design myself.

My own order is firm: the emotional kind comes first. Decoration can wait, and investment can take care of itself. Choose the work that stirs something in you, and let the room take shape around it.

In museums, in small galleries, on the walls of friends: go and see as much art as you can, paintings and prints alike. Art is a language all of us share, and it moves us in a way nothing else can.

We always encourage people to understand a work of art through their own feelings when they choose one. When you look at a work, you have to turn back to your inner self, and look at it from there.

The answer does not have to come from us. If money is tight, look closer to home. The scribbles of your children, a drawing by someone in your family, a sketch by someone who is no longer here and now lives only in your memory. Frame them simply and hang them on a wall you pass every day. They will remind you how much creativity matters, and how much skill lives in hands like those of our artisans. And they will let you see your own soul more clearly.

Keep visiting galleries, and when you can, meet the painter, the photographer or the artist behind a work. Ask how it began. Art is the whole process, not only the finished piece, and the stories behind it move us even more once we hear them.

Relief is one of the oldest ways people have put art on a wall. It was cut into Egyptian temple stone and ran in carved bands along Greek ones. Half of the work is the empty ground between the forms, and the old carvers gave that emptiness as much thought as the figures.

In the 1930s, while war was gathering again over Europe, artists in London began making reliefs that were entirely white: calm arrangements of shapes, nothing in them but form and shadow. People looked at them and breathed.

In Germany, the hour the war ended is still called Stunde Null: the zero hour. And twelve years on, two young painters there called their group Zero. One of the two wrote afterward that it was not a negation: "a zone of silence and of pure possibilities for a new beginning."

The void is not nothing. Light and air pass through it, and so do sound and time. We read the space between forms without knowing it: shapes set close together feel abundant and intimate, while a bare, wide wall can make a room feel like nobody lives there. White is a new page, not a blank one.

When the time came for our own collection, we chose relief. Square & Curve brings together three wall reliefs: Rilievo, built from squares, Curva, built from curves, and Tinta, in a single color. Their forms rise gently from a surface finished in fine sand, and the shadows along their edges shift with the daylight, from morning to evening. Each piece is made by hand, over a full 5 to 7 days.

A customer of ours, Marina, set one of our works just outside her apartment door, then carried it straight back inside. "I knew it would be gone in no time," she wrote. Another customer set a sculpture out on their front porch, and a little while later it was not there any more. Both stories end the same way: the place for a work you love is indoors.

Square & Curve is in our shop, and Rilievo, Curva and Tinta each have a page of their own. If one of them gives you goosebumps, you will know what that is now. And you will know where it belongs.

Manuela, architect and artist at The Soft Minimal