PARIS — Vincent Dubourg is fascinated by disaster.
His sculptures, resembling the remnants of an industrial accident or a natural calamity, often capture — like a still image in slow-motion photography — the moment when an object explodes in a violent blast or is pierced by a hostile tree branch.
Designing what is arguably household furniture, Mr. Dubourg’s pieces are a metaphor both for the effect of man’s waste upon the environment and the threat of nature lurking at the threshold of civilization. The violence done by nature or industry to man-made objects is central to the process by which he conceptualizes ordinary furniture into poetic sculpture.
“Whatever man makes is perpetually threatened by nature in the same way that man threatens nature,” Mr. Dubourg said before the opening of his solo show at the Carpenters Workshop Gallery in Paris.
“The deconstructing force of nature fascinates me,” he said.
The show, which runs through Dec. 20, includes early pieces and later work by an artist whose work blurs the lines between art and design.
“I make sculptures with a function, but that function is secondary,” Mr. Dubourg said. “My objects have no real usefulness.”
It can certainly be challenging to gauge any function out of the startling forms of Mr. Dubourg’s furniture. His “Armoire Chinoise” (2012), an upturned aluminum commode, bursting out as if impaled by a tree trunk, can hardly be used to store china. His “Vent sur la Table” (2008), an assemblage of twisted metal twigs, is more of an exercise in abstraction than a side table.
While the effects of a malevolent nature are less apparent in his most recent work, violent transformation imbued with a sense of nostalgia remain constant themes.
This year, Mr. Dubourg has experimented for the first time with color in the monumental piece titled “Bhanga Bronze,” a massive five-door buffet broken up in the center, in bronze finished in a yellow tint.
His pieces are made in a limited edition of eight, with four artist’s proofs, as is traditionally done for sculpture.
“To me, the association of art and design is natural,” Mr. Dubourg said. “Whatever the result, the sculptural aspect of the object gives the viewer freedom to see what he wants.”
For Mr. Dubourg, much of the thrill of making art is in the tactile pleasure of contorting material.
“I have no preference for any particular material,” he said. “As long as I can feel it and twist it, I can work with it.”
His gallerist, Julien Lombrail, prefers the term “functional sculpture” to describe Mr. Dubourg’s work, which he says tackle issues like climate change and environmental damage with an artist’s grace and intensity.
“Many designers today use computers to design and build objects,” Mr. Lombrail, co-founder of Carpenters Workshop Gallery, said. “With Vincent, you see and feel the hand of the artist in the work, not traces of a computer-generated design made by a production team.”
The two have been working together for 10 years, but their friendship goes back to their school days outside of Paris.
“Vincent would take a fork from the school cafeteria and twist it into a flower to impress the girls,” Mr. Lombrail said. “I was stunned both with his seduction technique and his talent as a sculptor.”
Mr. Dubourg, 36, studied applied arts at the Lycée Corvisart in Paris, and industrial design at École Pivaut in Nantes.
Moving on from metal forks, Mr. Dubourg turned his sights to twigs and tree branches that he would find outside his atelier near the town of Felletin, in the rural Limousin region in central France.
“I would steam the branches in a giant pressure cooker and twist them into shape,” he said. “The process may seem random but it is fully controlled.”
His work met early on with institutional success. His installation titled “La Voiture aux Oiseaux,” was acquired in 2007 by the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature in the Marais quarter of Paris. It consists of the carcass of an abandoned vehicle invaded by branches and birds’ nests.
“This car carcass, symbol of industry and pollution, denounces the impact of man on the environment,” said Myriam Aubry, assistant curator at the museum. “But it has itself been invaded by nature reclaiming its rights.”
In 2011, a double buffet from his Nouvelle Zélande series, its sideboards destroyed and its planks ripped open, entered the permanent collection of the Museum of Arts and Design in New York.
Though his work emanates stress, pressure and violence, Mr. Dubourg is a devotee of meditation and weeklong silent retreats.
“It is important to devote time to oneself, to concentrate and be in harmony with what is around us,” Mr. Dubourg said. “It is the only way to grasp society’s wants and needs, illusion and dreams.”