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Aug 7 2020
Surface
Design Dispatch
Film noir meets furniture, paintings made from fire extinguishers, and Samsung’s bean-shaped earbuds.
FIRST THIS
“What happens on our streets is critical to how we pull through this.”
HERE’S THE LATEST

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A Film Noir Take on VIDIVIXI’s Seductive Furniture

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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What Else Is Happening?

Check-Circle_2x Phillips unveils a digital product that tracks trending artists based on their media presence.
Check-Circle_2x Brazilian officials consider adding anti-drone antennae to the Modernist palaces of Brasilia.
Check-Circle_2x This week’s explosion in Beirut isn’t the first time that ammonium nitrate has caused calamity.
Check-Circle_2x An international effort to update the definition of “museum” causes widespread controversy.
Check-Circle_2x Expert analysis suggests that one’s chance of catching Covid-19 on an airplane is quite low.
Check-Circle_2x Oprah hands over the cover of her magazine to a painting of the late Breonna Taylor.


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DESIGNER OF THE DAY

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.

ITINERARY

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Lucien Smith: Southampton Suite

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.”

THE LIST

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Member Spotlight: Paola Navone

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.

AND FINALLY

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Today’s Attractive Distractions

Samsung’s strange new bean-shaped earbuds fit more snugly than AirPods.

Time-lapse footage captures the ambitious creation of a massive begonia mural.

These straightforward infographics bust common myths about nutrition.

Helen Burgess crafts rotund ceramic animals with cartoonish expressions.

               


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