Mark Grattan won’t be put into a box, but the sensual furniture he creates for VIDIVIXI merits a vitrine. Since relocating from Brooklyn to Mexico City in 2016, VIDIVIXI has landed on a fast track to becoming one of the design industry’s most sought-after purveyors of seductive and highly sophisticated furniture infused with global materiality and craftsmanship.

The design gallery The Future Perfect has long admired Grattan’s highly detailed approach. “Mark has an incredible sense of the very little things that subconsciously give the work an inimitable sense of chic,” says founder David Alhadeff, who recently signed VIDIVIXI to his gallery’s growing roster. Under normal circumstances, The Future Perfect might be toasting the new partnership with a vernissage attended by the New York design cognoscenti, but the coronavirus had other plans. Both parties were forced, somewhat serendipitously, into conceiving a way to showcase VIDIVIXI’s work digitally.

Enter Douglas Fenton, founder of the 3-D visualization studio Major Visual, who painstakingly developed a cinematic digital rendering that places seven new VIDIVIXI pieces in a museum-like setting. This is no white cube, nor does it resemble the half-hearted virtual viewing rooms that have become ubiquitous as physical galleries remain closed. Rather, the seductive setting shrouds the furniture in a sexy shadowplay that’s slightly evocative of film noir and old-time detective movies. Read more.

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By injecting elements of narrative and performance into his fixtures, Nader Gammas crafts architectural lighting that verges on sculpture. The up-and-coming lighting designer, who splits time between studios in Dubai and Boston, often allows the site to influence the look and feel of his forms, creating dramatic experiences of illumination that seem perfectly suited for their surroundings.

When: Until Jan. 31, 2021

Where: Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York

What: Lucien Smith began his Rain Paintings series when he discovered that filling fire extinguishers with acrylic paint enabled him to make quick, improvisational gestures whose light, ethereal end result expressed something he wasn’t able to previously obtain with traditional mark-making methods. “The process is very much like dancing with paint, how a conductor controls an orchestra,” says Smith, who completed the ten works on display during summer 2013 in Southampton. “The nozzle of the fire extinguisher acts like a wand. I became fixated on trying to understand, measure, and capture that fleeting moment.”

Paola Navone and her firm, Otto, take the ordinary and present it in a new and exciting way. Influenced by her travels all over the world, particularly to Asia and Africa, Navone scours the globe for inspiration. She has collaborated with major brands such as Baxter, Alessi, Gervasoni, and Cappellini, and designed a wide range of interiors, including hotels and private residences from Miami to Phuket, Thailand.

Surface Says: Many designers purport to have a global mindset and practice, but few live up to this in the way that Paola Navone does. Her free-spirited approach to design always delights and surprises.

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Helen Burgess crafts rotund ceramic animals with cartoonish expressions.