A Radical Notion : Design: Calling himself ‘an artist who makes furniture,’ David Mocarski fuses fine and functional art. His adopted slogan: ‘Form Follows Function.’

Behind the unmarked door of an anonymous brick building stand the workshop and showroom of radical furniture designer David Mocarski.

Beneath its quiet exterior, Mocarski’s Santa Monica shop is a fanfare of not-so-quiet design statements.

In the form of tables and chairs, hard-edged steel clashes with swirling glass and sleek veneered woods.

Throughout the showroom, smooth surfaces face off against jagged edges in a fight “to create a metaphor for today’s life structure,” according to the designer.

One Mocarski table, whimsically titled “Easy Mistake/Rearview Mirror,” evokes a freeway pileup. Its wide glass top teeters over crunched steel chunks that are strung together with iron bars.

“To Open the Moment/Crossroads” is a more serene table of butter-yellow steel under a glass oblong. It is designed to deliver the same message of urban frenzy but in sleeker form.

In another corner of the living room-sized showroom stand a bar table and stool. With slices of burnished aluminum and sturdy posture, it seems brash enough for a rowdy singles bar.

Operating under the commercial label Taction Design, Mocarski’s highly individual furniture has received increasing international recognition.

So far this year, the designer has had one-man shows in both Tokyo’s prestigious Axis Gallery and Santa Monica’s Art Options gallery. His work also was included in New York City’s International Contemporary Furniture Fair.

“David’s designs are unique fusions of fine and functional art,” said Santa Monica gallery owner Karl Bornstein, who not only has displayed Mocarski’s furniture but has some of his chairs and tables at home. “His things are not only highly crafted and beautiful, but also easy to live with.”

The fusion of fine and functional art in Mocarski’s work reflects the designer’s personal history. As a boy, he worked beside his father and grandfather in their Cleveland, Ohio, cabinetry shop.

As an adult, Mocarski’s earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from UC Santa Barbara and spent a decade teaching painting, drawing and printmaking at Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design.

“I learned to work with my hands as soon as I could hold a chisel,” Mocarski said. “The smell of fresh wood shavings and carpenter’s glue still lingers in my nostrils.

“This gave me a deep reverence for craftsmanship and a feeling for how physical objects are put together in the simplest and strongest ways,” he said.

A tall, lean 39-year-old with deep-set black eyes, big hands and a shy smile, Mocarski retains the slightly puzzled air of a displaced Midwestern craftsman.

Eight years ago, after a decade as a painter and sculptor, Mocarski became a full-time furniture maker, thanks to a group of people who owned some of his pieces.

“Those of us who collected David’s work said how nice it would be if he were free to make furniture full-time,” Bornstein said. “So a bunch of us got together and set him up in Taction Design, to provide a financial basis for his artistic freedom.”

“I wanted to reach a broader range of people than those one meets as a painter and printmaker,” said Mocarski. “And I felt that functional art offered me more scope to express my ideas.”

The stylistic ideas that interest Mocarski include the early Modernist concepts developed by the Russian Constructivists, the German Bauhaus and the Dutch De Stijl movement. Such design philosophies, he said, still contain much untapped creative energy.

Los Angeles art critic Peter Frank wrote of Mocarski’s Modernist revival designs: “In the shuffle of world events, contradictory ideologies and shifting fashions, these ideas have not succeeded or failed but simply fallen between the cracks.”

By ignoring the traditional boundaries that separate functional from fine art, Frank suggested that Mocarski has reinterpreted the unfulfilled early modern ideas in a Postmodern manner.

Mocarski, 39, said he chose the name “Taction” for his design studio because the word suggests touching and action .

“It signifies to me a conceptual and tactile communication, a kind of reaching out in sense and sensibility beyond the preserve of purely formal art,” he said.

Los Angeles fashion designer Elaine Johnson, another steady Mocarski client, said she admires the designer’s professionalism as well as his creativity.

“David’s no flake; he always delivers on time,” Johnson said. “The finished quality of his stuff is terrific, and it has to be, to satisfy someone as fussy as me. And he’s flexible, he’ll listen to what you want and adapt his designs to suit.”

Mocarski prefers to visit his clients’ homes to see how they live before creating one of his $5,000 tables or sideboards.

“Many of my designs are born of conversations with the patron,” he said. “I also take photos of the interiors of the house or office, make a lot of notes, and discuss budgets and materials. A successful design is always a collaboration.”

The designer said he resists being tagged “one of the trendy Angeleno furniture artists who seem so often to be no more than fashionable flash-in-the-pans. I’ve seen a lot of people get a quirky California label.”

Much of the currently fashionable art furniture is thoroughly uncomfortable, Mocarski claimed. “Designers who don’t really understand how furniture is put together by craftsmen and used by people concentrate solely on the aesthetics of a piece. Torture chairs and vicious tables are all too often the result.”

Mocarski himself finishes many of his chairs and tables, burnishing the aluminum, adjusting the steel elements and sanding the wood surfaces.

The membrane that separates his showroom from his workshop is a thin sheet of plastic through which the working silhouettes of Mocarski’s two busy assistants can been seen.

Not all of Taction’s objects are hard-edged and high-style. Several nostalgic designs, such as the “Kazimer/Take Me Back” chair, are inspired by memories of his grandmother’s house (which stood on Kazimer Street). They feature simple wooden members and fat padded seats, suggesting a sort of primal “chairness.”

The straightforward “Spanner” chair and the Art Deco-inspired “Tip of the Iceberg” side table luxuriate in nostalgia for a more gracious and easeful past.

Taction’s glass-topped “Counterpoint/Side Stander” tables are playful assemblies of colored Formica. His junky “Moonlight City” wall sconces might be comfortable in a Montessori kindergarten.

Some critics object to aspects of Mocarski’s designs they perceive to be tainted by “prettiness.”

Architect Diana Wong of Johnson, Fain & Pereira Associates, the project designer for the Karl Bornstein Gallery, accused Mocarski of straddling the fence between an honest expression of his hard-edged materials and a “slightly corrupt” desire to please.

“David wobbles between the functional and the cosmetic,” Wong said. “His steel tables, for instance, may start out sharp and raw, but he ends up painting them cosmetically.

“Maybe it happens precisely because he wants his pieces to function as art objects and as domesticated furnishings, where most other ‘art furniture’ is shamelessly more art than furniture,” said Wong.

Replied Mocarski: “I’m an artist who makes furniture. I believe that at the best level, art and usage can be seamlessly fused. The Modernist slogan was, after all, Form Follows Function--and that’s my slogan, too.”