Arnaud Eubelen reimagines cityscapes as matériauthèques for his latest exhibition

Arnaud Eubelen, a German industrial designer who works at the junction of art and sculptural design, is currently showcasing his latest array of works at the Tools Gallery in Belgium. The exhibition Night Street Walk captures the essence of design by drawing inspiration from the material layers of changing cityscapes. The colourful design exhibition commenced on November 17, 2022, and will be on till January 14, 2023. “All these lamps are inspired by what you can see of certain facades while walking in the small streets of Brussels. Gathering them one after the other generates a kind of walk in the gallery,” says Eubelen.

The product designer has established his oeuvre in the artistic intersection of art, design, and technology; he questions the assumptions and redundant approaches for conceptualising objects and ascertaining their functionalities. He questions the dependability of the design world on generic construction materials only to re-value and re-appropriate them towards improvised, equivalently aesthetic and highly creative alternatives to functional objects. He perceives the streets of the man-made world as hardware stores, or, as he puts it, "matériauthèque," by logically reprogramming and reinventing the urban framework that every cityscape encompasses in various material layers and their own tales and personalities.

"This image often comes to my mind: think of the walls of a house as a skin, what happens if you peel off this skin if it is turned over or torn. The house becomes a bunch of layers to peel, and the heart of the building is revealed. The wall becomes porous, it changes scale, metamorphoses into an object," adds Eubelen as he designs ideologies and the thought behind each of his sculptural lamps. As part of the solo exhibition, Eubelen presents the lamp designs that he creates as the reflections of a city. He uses the usual materials serving different purposes across a town to repurpose them into sculptural lights. For instance, he fashions a fishnet fence with a warm-lit source of light in his ‘My sweet neighbour’ lamp and even pairs a fractile concrete bench with an aluminium shutter to form a brutalist lamp shaped like a seater named ‘Domotic.’ Tools gallery also displays the series of Antenna lamps designed by Eubelen that he creates using shards of waste glass and Antenna alongside the Bookcage series of lighting designs created using waste wooden planks.

Eubelen often observes the waste materials scattered across the streets as design ornaments instead of dirt. He surveys the streets, scans the yards, crosses intersections, and cycles across the cities in the early mornings searching for the perfect pieces of waste wooden planks, grills, fishnets, concrete blocks or even remnants of a deconstruction, building up his material library for enticing and highly creative furniture designs and lighting solutions. “Due to their design, these works are micro-architectures. The status of these objects is deliberately ambiguous, they do not provide functional lighting, but are nevertheless inspired by shapes known in the house, such as a chandelier or a wall lamp,” says Eubelen. “Composed mainly of materials recovered in the street, they literally peel away what the walls of our homes are made of. They highlight their porosity and the flows that pass through them. They are a form of testimony to the concept of intimacy, indoor living and voyeurism,” he concludes.