Between Force and Fragility: The Weaponised Glassworks of Francisco Figueiredo Lopes

Francisco Figueiredo Lopes (Lisbon, 1998) is a sculptor whose practice unfolds at the volatile intersection of creation and destruction. Based in Lisbon, Lopes’ work traverses the cycles of extraction, transformation, and consumption, using sculpture not only as a material pursuit but also as a critical framework for engaging with the systems that govern our world.

In a striking recent series, Lopes entraps instruments of violence—revolvers, police batons, axes—between sheets of molten glass. The result is a body of work that contrasts the brutal power of weaponry with the delicate, unpredictable nature of glass. These are not simply sculptures; they are confrontations. The solid permanence of a gun is suspended—literally and symbolically—within a medium more associated with fragility, transparency, and rupture.

Each piece is shaped by a process both controlled and chaotic. The industrial act of embedding metal into molten glass introduces elements of unpredictability: bubbles form, surfaces crack, and edges warp under heat. What emerges is a frozen moment of tension, where tools of control are rendered impotent—disarmed by the very medium that now imprisons them. In this sense, the works are more than aesthetic compositions; they are acts of symbolic disarmament.

This tension between control and collapse runs throughout Lopes’s broader practice. His Power Tool series critiques the seductive allure of violence in media and design, exposing the absurd beauty we assign to tools of destruction. In Attached, he maps the intimate ties between extraction and production, revealing how the systems we depend on for survival are often rooted in domination and depletion.

By embedding weapons in glass, Lopes doesn’t neutralize their symbolic charge—he amplifies it. The viewer is forced to reckon with the contradiction: instruments of power rendered motionless, trapped in an alchemical moment where material and meaning dissolve into one another. These objects are no longer functional; they are relics of a system interrogated and interrupted.

Lopes’ work has appeared in several group exhibitions, always engaging with sculpture as a method of inquiry. His installations push beyond form, probing how we relate to objects shaped by history, ideology, and industry. What we hold, what we wield, and what we discard—all become tools for thinking through power and vulnerability.

In these latest works, the message is both simple yet resonant: even the strongest instruments of power can shatter. And in their silence, perhaps, lies the beginning of something new.

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