In March, design events are multiplying along with new galleries in office buildings, apartments and townhouses.
Artist Erwan Boulloud presents 15 new works at "Touching Time," in Tribeca's Twenty First gallery. It's the French designer's first solo show in six years. Influences for Boulloud's furniture range from the solar system to medieval jewels and even microscopic images of cells, and those are quite visible in the finished works. A decadent console with brass marquetry and embedded gemstones is joined in a pattern of barklike shapes. His boulder shaped, steel coffee table, Roeco, is laser-cut on top and carved with radiating lines; sapphire gems sunken into the center of every ripple. Boulloud, a self-proclaimed "firm proponent of 21st-century craftsmanship," creates these effects by mixing traditional techniques with new technology, for example 3-D printing a set of cocoon-shaped bronze sconces, a form the artist says would have been impossible otherwise. But it's Boulloud's elegant, heavy mechanical lamps that call to me the most: Top-heavy shades of veined milky alabaster stone are held upright by intricately grooved steel arms and bases.
