What’s Happening: Just in time for L.A. Art Week, the Italian visionary rethinks his past, and our future, at The Future Perfect’s new house in the hills.

The Download: Gaetano Pesce’s revelations still illuminate today. As a major force in the Italian Radical Design movement, which saw designers turning from stiff Modernism and towards the loose and peculiar, Pesce has spent half a century making furniture that makes rooms different. His signature resins and other synthetics let the light linger within his creations, which can veer in form towards the childlike, the creepy, the sexy, the strange, recasting the chair as a stage. He embraces the artificiality of Pop but rejects its cynicism, and deploys the theatricality of Memphis without falling for its brainiac peacocking.

The fact that design shops from Tokyo to Topeka are cluttered with work that seeks to emulate his effortless weirdness shouldn’t dim the joy of seeing the real thing, which makes “Dear Future,” a new survey show at The Future Perfect, a good reason to visit the gallery’s new flagship in the Hollywood Hills. “With the recent opening of the Goldwyn House, and with the gallery celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, it felt like something truly grand was in order,” founder David Alhadeff tells Surface. “Pesce laid the foundations for what we now call collectible design. The show presents the expansiveness of his practice, both a depth of thought and a simple desire to bring joy through his objects.”

While the show is no parade of greatest hits, Pesce does rethink a few of his most beloved creations. “The motif of the female form and femininity is celebrated throughout this exhibition,” says gallery director Laura Young. “It’s a theme he has returned to over and over again throughout his career.” And so the baby-as-ball-and-chain meditation on maternity of 1969’s UP5_6 returns now in recycled Italian bottle corks, as if to symbolize a more hopeful life cycle. Nearby, an eight-foot-tall resin tapestry of a kneeling pregnant person, Donna con titolo skin, seems to pray for us all.

“The reality of Pesce’s work is that it is rooted in particular materials, resin and rubbers,” Young says, “and the way he uses them creates a synchronicity that visually unites them with his past.” And so new takes on those materials offer new visions of the past: for his 2002 series Nobody’s Perfect, Pesce hand-cast opaque resin in molds without uniform dimension, creating ever-changing colorfield furniture whose final form seemed to depend upon how you looked at them. Now, he returns to the project but pulls the curtain back by offering translucent iterations, reveling in the imperfections through highlighting them.

As usual, Pesce prefers new work over nostalgia, so he carries on the Leaf Shelves series in pleasurable foliage tones. The natural world appears unnaturally cheery in his Multicolored Lamps with Rocks, for which he hand-cast rocks in resin, and vases that variously resemble aortae, talons, tentacles, and tubby little friends. “Pesce hates to think about the past, so, as a rule, his work remains focused on the future,” Young says. “This presentation is a rare instance of the two converging, offering a glimpse at his past next to his new works, which embody the future of materiality, the future of form, and generally the future—in the temporal sense—as it is defined by Gaetano.” And per the maestro, the future is bright.

In Their Own Words: “Most of the pieces are impossible to replicate one-to-one,” Alhadeff says. “It’s a subtle aspect of his work—or, rather, not one that is spoken about very often—but this gentle subversion of the industrial process really captures the mischievous spark with which Pesce works.”

Surface Says: With the international art fair season in full swing, joy can be hard to find, but it remains admirably undimmed in Pesce’s work even after all these years.

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At last November’s opening of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s controversial redesign of the Hirshhorn Museum’s sculpture garden in Washington, D.C.—designed with Brutalist vigor in 1974 by Gordon Bunshaft and given verdant new life in 1981 by landscape architect Lester Collins—the museum’s director Melissa Chiu joined First Lady Jill Biden and a go-go band to celebrate the institution’s new direction. “We see how the most important artists of our time are working today across every media,” Chiu said, “and exploring technology and innovation in every form, from sculpture and video to sound and performance.”

And, apparently, reality television. On March 3, seven American artists will sashay away from the traditional competition of building an art career and make it work for MTV on The Exhibit: Finding The Next Great Artist. For judging, Chiu will be joined by guests artist Adam Pendleton, artist-critic-NFT booster Kenny Schachter, and assorted sociologists, strategists, and collectors.

The six episodes will air after RuPaul’s Drag Race, a show that proves talent can survive the medium’s inherent humiliations. There’s real artistic legitimacy in the group of contestants, too, including photographer Baseera Khan and sculptor Misha Kahn. So here’s hoping the group can find inspiration in the endurance of reality television as the judges ask them to, per the press release, “respond to a single piece from the Hirshhorn’s collection and comment on a pressing issue of our time.” That might not necessarily make great art, but if they don’t fuck it up, it might make great TV.

A few decades ago, Christian Louboutin was tooling around Portugal, and became so smitten with the beauty of the small town of Melides that he crashed his car and stayed. He moved his atelier there, then moved there, and in 2019 began working on a hotel. This April, guests can stay in Vermelho, the footwear savant’s first stab at a hospitality project, a collaboration with architect Madalena Caiado and operated by Marugal.

Thirteen ornate rooms, each hidden behind custom Baroque doors of hand-worked American ash with pewter and enamel handles but otherwise unique in their styling, gather around a garden by landscape designer Louis Benech. Custom tiles and ceramics clad floors and walls in riotous colors, as do extravagant hand-painted murals. After a massage in a suite of Luxor alabaster, lucky guests can repair to a green Indian Giada marble bar with silver paneling courtesy of ecclesiastical Sevillian metalsmiths, then dine on octopus salad and lamb chops with migas chimichurri at Xtian, the colorful restaurant. Indeed, the interiors boast Louboutin’s signature nervy use of color—including, of course, his favored red that gives the hotel its name.

Last week, Hennessy and Alicia Keys hosted an intimate group of cultural figures for a dinner and private concert at Joshua Tree’s famed architectural masterpiece, the Kellogg Doolittle House. The home was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright mentee Kendrick Bangs Kellogg and, with its otherworldly curvature, remains one of the finest examples of organic architecture. Forty friends of Keys and the brand took in its splendor throughout the evening.

When was it? Feb. 7

Where was it? Kellogg Doolittle House, Joshua Tree

Who was there? Swizz Beatz, Moses Sumney, Brigette Romanek, Alton Mason, and more.

When: Until March 31

Where: Nina Johnson, Miami

What: From unwound bronze vases to tangled neon chandeliers, William Farrell and Elliott Hundley’s unconventional pieces are both livable and lived-in. They’re also one-of-a-kind and unreplicable, with each mold destroyed in the traditional firing process and the end result displaying the grooves and ridges of the duo’s fingerprints. Here, they present a dialect of artifacts linking histories of the past, present, and future, treating each object as drawings never fully realized, sketches continually finessed that beckon human touch.

Last week, Twitter announced it would soon eliminate free access to its third-party API. The move stems from new owner Elon Musk’s intent to purge the service of automated accounts not controlled by humans, which account for up to 29 percent of all U.S. content on the platform. Many of these accounts churn out fake responses—hashtags used en masse to influence trending topics, or perhaps to spew incendiary political rhetoric. (They can also track his private jet.) Under a new policy, access to Twitter’s API would cost $99 per month, and numerous bot accounts tweeted they may go dark when the changes hit.

The move could impact a multitude of services that make using Twitter more seamless and enjoyable. Many bots offer helpful features, like the ability to take screenshots, get reminders, read threads in a more organized way, and receive alt text for images. Others range from silly to serious, splicing up crowded feeds with information that pays no attention to trending topics or political turbulence. As design critic Alexandra Lange notes in Curbed, the change could also eliminate design and museum bots. These are programmed to crawl public collections, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Open Access to 492,000 artworks, and tweet images multiple times a day.

For 40 years, Janus et Cie has served clients with a focus on quality, craftsmanship, and unparalleled service. Janus et Cie maintains 19 flagship showrooms in North America, Singapore, Sydney, and Milan, as well as field offices and select dealers.

Surface Says: Janus et Cie produces furniture that embodies quality and excellence. Part of the company’s appeal is its commitment to sustainability—proving that recycled wood, plastic, and upholstery can be deluxe when in the right hands.

Researchers are turning agricultural waste into oil to fight food insecurity.

The East Village Eye’s archives are heading to the New York Public Library.

Once a snooty delicacy, caviar is now being served as a cheaper snack.

This Broadway electrician has seen Phantom of the Opera 13,000 times.