EDIT.
by Jhonathan Baena
Jhonathan Baena works across art & image, shaping narratives within fashion, design, and art, with a refined focus on furniture and the procurement of objects of desire..
Born and raised on Aruba, he now spends most of his time between Paris and Amsterdam. His background in photography still informs how he sees, though his work today moves fluidly between art direction and image-making. Much of it is long-term and under wraps — spanning films, spatial projects, and identities — all connected by a curiosity about how beauty lives in the everyday.
Jhonathan is drawn to people who build worlds of their own — Jim Walrod, Axel Vervoordt, Wim Crouwel, Rem Koolhaas, Peter Saville — each of them informing parts of his curiosity and helping him look at the world in new ways.
Item
“I love my Bomber Short Rubber in ash. It feels like a modern solution to an ancient issue: being elegant and protected at once.”
Bomber short rubber ash
Book
“Probe Vol. 2 (1995) by OMA/Rem Koolhaas: Generic City. I love this catalogue because it feels more like an artwork than a book. Created for the 1995 OMA exhibition in Tokyo, it layers neon text, translucent pages, and Araki’s photo-story of the city. Chaotic, layered, and experimental, it feels like holding a snapshot of Rem Koolhaas’s ideas about the city in book form, and it challenges you to think about how ideas can be communicated in new ways. A catalogue that thinks it’s an artwork, and perhaps it is.”
Place
“My home in Amsterdam — my never-ending exploration ground — is my safe space, a place that holds me when I need it.”
Seat
“If you know me, you know I have Zig-Zag chairs by Gerrit Rietveld in every home I live in. My friends and clients often joke that it’s a problem. I’ve traced it back to the first Zig-Zag chair I ever remember noticing, in a book from my CKV (Culturele en Kunstzinnige Vorming) class at school back on Aruba. Growing up in a former Dutch colony, we learned a lot about Dutch design, and that was the chair that made me question what a chair could be."
Artist
“I spent most of my last year in Mexico City working on a project and fell in love with the objects from Atelier Emaús while browsing at flea markets. It’s a workshop that began in the 1950s at a Benedictine monastery near Cuernavaca, where monks and artists collaborated to rethink religious art. At the time, Catholicism was undergoing a global redefinition leading up to the Second Vatican Council (1962 to 1965), and their work reflects that search for a modern, more open spiritual expression. They remind me of my childhood, growing up in a home with little art on the walls, but always a cross.”
