Black Light at Valextra
Introducing our Black Light exhibition at the Valextra Flagship Store
Launching at Milan 2021, we will stage an exhibition at next-door neighbout Valextra, the iconic Italian luxury leather goods brand.
Inspired by the archives of the Milanese masters Gio Ponti, Ettore Sottsass and Achille Castiglioni, Black Light - a display of 10 monumental LED light forms by Tom Dixon and Austrian lighting specialists Prolicht - will sit alongside Valextra's new Chiaroscuro handbag capsule collection.
Set against the minimal interior by John Pawson, Valextra is the perfect place to show our light scupltures.
In celebration of the LED, we've created CODE. The designs use just two elements, a circle and a square, which we can configure and reconfigure into endless amounts of objects.
Tom Dixon: So we're lucky to have good neighbours in Milan, and our neighbours here are Valextra - an iconic leather bag brand from Milan and they've allowed us to come in and make this huge exhibition of our new sculptures.
So here we see Valextra which is a John Pawson interior which is completely minimal and a perfect place to show these light sculptures. I've become so fascinated by LEDs and circuit boards that I wanted to do something aswell this year which was to work exclusively in celebrating the LED. We've been collaborating over the last year with Prolicht who are an Austrian contract lighting specialist that really work mainly in track lighting and it's always struck me that track lighting is an essential thing, but can often be really boring. So what we've created here is a system called CODE which is a means of using just two elements that you see here: a circle and a square which we can configure and reconfigure into endless amounts of extraordinary objects.
When I first arrived in Milan I was amazed because there was no design culture in the UK, but Italy really love design and Milan in particular produced a whole series of amazing, inspirational designers, and this exhibition is a homage to the greats: Sottsass, Castiglioni... so these scupltures are just the beginning point and what I'm hoping is that other architects and other designers are then liberatedto make things in a Mecano kind of way where there ideas are even more extraordinary than these.