![]() ![]() Once you’ve been shown his lights, you can’t stop seeing them. He’s known internationally as just Omer-you know, like Madonna or Adele.” When I go to design fairs around the world, Omer is the Canadian designer who’s represented the most. You walk by any restaurant on the street, and those are his cast-glass lights above the tables. I sat for a coffee with Alan Elder, curator of craft and design at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, who said, “I can’t get over it. It is unabashedly a masterpiece, a swirling alien creature that’s constantly attended by visitors, who hold their phones aloft for photos. As though to underline his new standing, in September Arbel installed a 30-metre-tall light sculpture in the grand entrance of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London-a swarm of 280 glass pendant lamps suspended by chaotic copper wires. This spring he was invited to present work at the dearly exclusive Euroluce (part of Milan Design Week), which can be read as a serious turning point. “There’s great disappointment, there’s mourning, and then there’s the paradigm shift.”Īgainst his wishes, Omer Arbel has himself become a reputable product, one that is highly branded, one that is the recipient of 23 major awards and a nominee for dozens more. Nine out of 10 projects end in failure-we don’t reach our destination, the client’s patience runs out…” He holds up the malformed piece of glass, which might be an abstract human skull. “What’s your emotional response to failure?” “Let’s talk about failure,” I suggest, while Arbel absentmindedly turns a prototype around in his hand. Dennis says the openness is the trick, that Arbel teaches them all to rapidly change course when things aren’t working, to remain available to the possibility that a project has gone wrong. He is constantly concerned with things the rest of us would find useless: a pile of hay, a suitcase full of paper lanterns. ![]() Yes, there was intense and backbreaking labour to get here, but the key to Arbel’s accomplishments lies in the dogged pursuit of what should never have paid off. In a way, he’s become a success despite himself. Staffers describe periods of quiet at the office punctuated by extreme “ADD-like” energy when Arbel arrives. ![]() (“Spaz” is a term he uses.) And when I speak with Mark Dennis, one of Arbel’s onsite collaborators, he describes working there as an “amorphous” experience, full of “huge but practical dreams.” Arbel’s a man who smiles when he explains things, like he’s always about to deliver a punch line. Yet Arbel admits to being a less-than-sober designer. And it’s true that it has become difficult to pick up a home magazine where his lights aren’t featured-his influence has, quite suddenly, become ubiquitous. Sales numbers at Bocci are under strict guard, but he says that figures have doubled every year since he founded the company in 2005. Watching him play with sugar beet foam, it’s worth remembering Arbel has become one of the most commercially successful creative minds in Canada, and certainly one of the world’s great designers of lights. When the foam hardened, we took the hay away and revealed these great cavities.” He feels around inside the cave/wall and I nod at the monstrosity it’s typical of the work here, which always begins with thoroughly impractical exploration. “We stacked all these bales of hay,” Arbel explains, “and shot a polyurethane foam rendered from sugar beets around it all. When I climb up a strange industrial staircase at Bocci headquarters I find Arbel looking at a massive wall of white “shelving” that more resembles a bank of miniature whitewashed caves. At Bocci, his design firm, these ambient lights are the moneymakers-the products that pay for a studio playground. Today he is 37 and stands beneath chandeliers of white spheres, glass echoes of those paper lanterns. There was no apparent purpose to this behaviour, except to see the thing he loved and know it better. He photographed his installations obsessively and cut those photos up to make collages (à la David Hockney). By this method he gave himself a constellation that went wherever he did. In each new city, Arbel painted his bedroom white and hung these lights around his bed at every height (some just inches from the floor). Each move, he brought with him a suitcase stuffed with 40 white paper lanterns, cheap collapsible things he’d scrounged from Chinatowns. Between the ages of 18 and 24, the designer Omer Arbel lived in Mexico City, New York, Toronto, Rome, and Barcelona. ![]()
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