‘Hallucinations‘ is an apt name for the immersive and mesmerizing light installation currently on exhibition at the gallery within ABC Home in New York’s Flatiron District at 888 Broadway.

Lighting designer, Enzo Catellani, and master glass craftsman, Giuliano Geiger, are the artists in creative collaboration for the Hallucinations installation.

The company, Catellani & Smith, established in 1989 near Bergamo in Northern Italy, is a charming testimony to Enzo Catellani’s appreciation for wit and legend. The company’s first brochure notes a fictional profile of the founders, the Italian blacksmith, Carlo Catellani, and British architect, Logan Smith.

This is a legend, for these ‘founders’ do not exist beyond Enzo’s colorful imagination…in fact, Carlo is Enzo’s father and Logan Smith, his racehorse. It is this colorful wit and imagination that go into every handcrafted light as they are inspired by nature and mysticism with names like ‘Tree of Light’ and ‘The Moon in the Well’.

It was on a trip to ‘Salone’, the annual furniture show in Milano, that Paulette Cole, owner and creative director of ABC Home, and Colleen Newell, senior director of design and merchandising, had the opportunity of meeting Enzo and visiting his ‘laboratory of light’ in a town near Bergamo.
This trip led to the Cosmos Collection, launched in the fall of 2014, an ABC Co-Create collaboration between ABC and Catellani & Smith. Co-Create, a concept unique to ABC, is the perfect marriage of art and commerce and a mindful nurturing of artisanship.

To be captured by the charm of Enzo and his dedicated craftsmanship, the colors and forms of the workshop’s magical pieces, and the very power of verdant nature beyond the glass windows, transformed into a marriage between Enzo and ABC.

A plan was hatched and executed by the able team of workmanship that is ABC Home. In 3 weeks a space was created, walls were put up and Matteo Petrucci came from Italy to curate. The exhibition, ‘Hallucinations’, went up on the mezzanine gallery on May 7 and will run through July 20th. The one of a kind pieces of lighting-as-fine art are available for sale at ABC.

Edward Nashen, ABC gallery specialist, obliged me with a personal tour. When I saw the first light, called ‘Blue Glass’, I said, ‘It’s an iris’. Edward countered with, ‘It’s a dream!’ And truly, this lighting-as-sculpture, this radiating energy in a room, the reflections and projections of celestial dreaminess is ‘Hallucinations’.

As Colleen Newell so well put it, ‘Enzo deeply channels the ABC eye’.

And indeed, ‘Hallucinations’ resonates with the eye that is Spirit and Flesh magazine.

Hallucinations – Exhibition extended until July 20