The Enlightenment

Rome-based In-es.artdesign is a lighting and home accessories company that merges an artistic sensibility with design know-how. Founded in 2003 by artist-designer Luciano M. Mazzilli, its products are both functional and layered, many of them evoking natural or existential phenomena such as the waxing and waning of the moon or the passing of time. It’s no surprise then to find out that its lead designer, Oçilunam, also studied philosophy.

The name In-es is two-fold. On the one hand it stands for both interior and exterior (i.e. the company produces lighting for outside as well as indoors), but the name also plays with the idea of the external world of aesthetics and beauty versus the far more intimate, instinctive and primitive world of the Freudian id (Es in Italian), according to Oçilunam. When asked where the inspiration for the objects comes from in the main, he is equally enigmatic and compelling. “They happen by chance in the true Dadaist sense of the word,” he says. “Chance with its divine imperfections and the corrosive and smoothing intervention of time and its passing.”

Accordingly, the lights produced by the company are at once functional and artistic, tactile and metaphorical. They range from the atmospheric Luna pendant and floor light (made out of Nebulite, a bespoke blend of resin and fibre that replicates the crater-like and textured surface of the moon and creates striking dappled effects) to the recent Matt collection of pendants and over-sized floor lamps that come in three finishes – cement, nebula and blackboard – and that won the German Design Award in 2015 and 2016, and the Iconic Award in 2016.

The first uses a cement varnish to great effect; the second flaunts an almost marble-like exterior, again made out of Nebulite; the third uses a blackboard finish, which can be written on and then erased. The lavagna (or blackboard) range was designed to evoke childhood games or memories of first days at school; it is a light made for the child of any age that marvels at the world.

At the upcoming Light + Building fair in Frankfurt in mid-March (Hall 5.1 Stand B21), the brand will be showing the Matt light with new internal colours of bronze, silver, magenta and blue, which will be added to the existing versions of turquoise, orange, red, white and gold insides. In order to highlight the playful and creative aspect of the blackboard range of the light, In-es.artdesign has collaborated with Frankfurt’s international academy for art and architecture, the Städelschule to host a series of live drawing and writing events on the stand every day at noon in which the blackboard-finish lights will play a starring role. Artists from Russia (Aleksei Moskalev), Turkey (Erinc K. Cooley), Kazakhstan (Madina Bissenova) and India (Vinay Shekar) will take part, as will Oçilunam. The resulting and unique art-design pieces will be auctioned after the fair.

Also on display in Frankfurt will be another recent launch, the be.pop collection. Inspired by popular culture and movements like pop art and bebop jazz (a highly improvised and innovative form of jazz born in the 1940s), these pieces look on first appearance like they have been crafted out of ceramics, but on closer inspection reveal themselves to be composed of Laprene, a material similar to rubber. The lights come mostly in urban, monochromatic blues, whites and greys, but with colourful electrical wires. The signature piece in the collection, the cacio&pepe, was conceived jointly by Oçilunam and Serbian designer Djordje Cukanovic and is based on the famed Italian parmesan grater. In the hands of these two designers it, becomes a versatile piece that can be a pendant, a table lamp, a wall lamp, or even a sculptural installation when several models are hung from a horizontal wire in a row. Available in poppy and electric reds and yellows the cacio&pepe light is adorned with brightly coloured diffusors that are as much part of the piece as the innovative ‘shade’ is.

What sets In-es.artdesign apart as a company is its entirely in-house manufacturing and hand-finishing process. “Our collections are produced at our facilities here in Rome,” says Francesca Aielli, export manager for the brand. “That way we can maintain absolute control over the quality.” A few items are produced in limited edition and celebrate the art-design ethos even more fully, she explains. In these instances, certain pieces from the collection are selected and transformed by Oçilunam. An example of a limited piece is the H2O Unica created out of an H2O light that was lined inside with a dense collage of stained tea bags – herbal or berry flavours as their pink hues attest to – that were laid to resemble a cladding of weathered pebbles and give the light interior (an often neglected area) a highly tactile look and feel.

“We are always trying to elude the traditional canons of both industrial design and craftsmanship, and do something that goes beyond both,” says Oçilunam. Another case in point is the Trame range of lights, whose shades are made out of hand-knitted fabric immersed in resin. The lights look at once hand-crafted and soft, while being hard to the touch; they also cast beautiful geometric shadows on the walls once lit. Another version of Trame is covered in striped, coloured yarn, created especially for In-es.artdesign by sartorial workshops; this one combines the shimmering play of light and shadow to wondrous chromatic effect.

What does the future hold for the company? “We are looking at the possibility of opening a showroom abroad in 2017. We are keen on New York as we’d like to have a physical presence in the North American market,” reveals Aielli. “Before that we will take part in the London Design Festival this September, and next year in 2017 we will be at Euroluce at the Milan furniture fair.” The company is also going to focus its R&D on its exterior lighting collection she says, both in terms of number of ranges and of technology. Its ambition and mission is to continue to combine good design with artistic intent, and to create products and lights that explore emotions and memories in tactile, functional and aesthetic ways.

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Visit In-es.artdesign at Light + Building 2016

Messe Frankfurt
Hall 5.1 Stand B21
13 to 18 March

Special events, such as YOUNG ARTISTS TURN DESIGN INTO ART, will be held daily at the stand.