Belgium

One of the things about collecting art is the need to illuminate it properly. In most cases you end up dealing with some form of tract lighting that can be directed onto a specific piece. The problem is, the lights while functional, are usually, ugly, hot, and put out light that has a color temperature that isn’t pure white.

Thanks to Belgian designer Bart Lens, there is now an alternative that uses OLED panels. Oh!led is a contemporary light fixture with a minimalist design. Each lamp is just 5 milimeters thick and suspended from a pencil thin shaft. The head rotates 180 degrees for quick positioning, and the Philips Brite Lumiblade OLED panel produces a pure white balanced light. The Philips Brite Lumiblade is the world’s brightest organic light-emitting diode (OLED) available to date.

Produced by Lens°Ass Architecten, for Eden Design the panel produces a soft diffused light that is extremely close to natural light which s perfect for art on display. If your need is more for illuminating your living areas, instead of displaying your fine collectables, Oh!led offers a warm color temperature as well. And while the images shown here show the fixture in black, it is available in white for even an even more discrete lighting solution.

I often talk about craft, attention to detail, and the hand of the artist in relation to the visual arts and design. Today’s piece of inspiration is the epitome of those things.

At the Villa Empain, Boghossian Foundation in Brussels, is a carpet designed and drawn by artist Jonathan Bréchignac. The carpet is an image filled with amazing details all rendered by hand as a life size drawing. It was drawn using Bic pens. That’s right everything from the tassels to the weave patterns were all drawn by hand using blue Bic ball point pens. In addition to the hand work, Bréchignac has rendered a QR code on each corner. The QR codes take you to a specific messages and symbols that Bréchignac has created for the viewer.