Café Janis
Sebastião Lobo is a rising jeweler and concept artist working in Lisbon. After graduating from the António Arroio art school, Sebastião soon opened his first jewelry studio, beginning an already vast artistic journey which evolved into finer arts like sculpture, plastic arts and scenography. He has collaborated with Astolfi Studio in the highly coveted Hermés’ shop window and the décor for the Pau Brasil concept shop and has conceived a shop window display for Mercedes-Benz, showing an oeuvre always open to dialogue. The almost taxonomic sculpture work using iron wire, where animals appear to be shadows or sketches, or the jewelry work, where animals appear in an elegant simplicity, are proof of the infinite approaches he can take on a single theme. Sebastião Lobo also made a whale and jellyfish using plastic bottles in a work commissioned by the Oceano Azul foundation and a fiberglass shark skeleton for the +351 shop further proving that, in his artistic practice, nothing is impossible.
This openness, mixed with the rigor of the artist’s vision, allow Sebastião’s work to be presented in award winning jewelry shows, individual shows at independent plastic arts galleries as well as projects for well reputed institutions: he created two sculptures and designed the trophy for Deloitte’s award shows, made the design and scenography for Ginásio Clube Português’ annual show, designed utilitarian and decorative pieces for Plano restaurant and the IVENS Hotel in Lisbon, created a sculpture in the middle of a beach for Yamba, in Costa da Caparica, created a sophisticated reinvented menorah created for the website L’Objet among many other institutional works. With a fully developed artistic direction and aesthetic vision, Sebastião Lobo’s work makes use of his refined techniques to create well thought out moods and works of art that can serve purely aesthetic purposes or get involved in cooperative works of big dimensions.
I have been changing my discipline over the last few years. It’s not that I’m no longer doing what I started with, I just need to keep it varied. My studies are in jewelry, which I think is mainly the base for all my work. I worked for five years as a jeweler, developing design and production. With time I started varying the disciplines where I now focus. Nowadays, I consider myself more of a designer. I enjoy the development and production processes.
My dream as a child was to be an archaeologist. I had some kind of obsession with the ancient. I remember telling my mom, and she probably had a stroke, and kind of suggested why wouldn’t I try something related like sculpture or jewelry. And I think from then on it was an idea that stuck in my mind. I went to professional art high school, and then I opened my first studio, a place that belonged to the private jeweler of the Portuguese dictator. He had passed away some years before and the place was like a time capsule, it was incredible!
One person who’s inspired me a lot is Alexander Calder—the wire sculptures and the mobile are stunning. Then there’s Martin Chirino, Jean Tingley, Hans Peta Kamm, René Lalique, Kuka, and the list goes on.
It’s a mess, a war zone! Always full of dust and messy cigarette butts. I clean and organize once a week, but a few seconds after it looks like a bomb just exploded inside. I always have my bench work, and then a massive and dramatic table, like a meeting table, but I do more dinners there than meetings. The surroundings are full of objects, ones that I collect, but mainly old and new pieces, objects that are a “work in progress” for life (because sometimes I just don’t finish them). In the end my studio is a weird life creature.
I never thought about it, but it would be people with totally opposite opinions from each other, to be messy. What would I serve? No idea, it really would depend on the mood of craziness that I would like to create. And money in my bank account of course.
Nowadays, I have no idea. I think I can’t imagine myself doing anything else. Of course, Ii have some days that I wish I chose another career, but I always end up always figuring out that I enjoy what I do too much, it fulfils me.
I think I’m an Aries. I don’t know much about it.
