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Friday Five with Vicente Garcia-Jimenez

We met Spanish-born industrial designer Vicente Garcia-Jimenez, who now works out of Udine, Italy, on our trip to the lighting company Foscarini in Venice this past fall. In addition to having designed three pendants lights for Foscarini (Le Soleil, Fields, Big Bang), Garcia-Jimenez has also designed numerous other lamps, as well as sculptural and functional furniture pieces. He also works in ephemeral architecture and brand installations. He recently earned the Elle Decor International Design Award by the magazine’s Spain edition. For this week’s Friday Five, Garcia-Jimenez shared images that represent the starting point for some of his designs. He says, “All these pictures inspire me to think about concepts in my work. Every picture, if you observe well, is fantastic, rich with beauty, fascination, and magic.”

1. Fields
Aerial views are magical and fascinating. Looking at the ground from the windows of an aircraft, one sees the geometrical compositions and color contrast created by nature or human beings. This is an aerial landscape of somewhere in Germany.

2. Metamorphosis
Metamorphosis is the beauty of transformation. Conceptual death and life. A miracle of nature that makes me reflect about the magnificence of change, and how one thing can become another.

3. Caleido, San Sebastian, Spain
I remember the first time I thought about infinity and space, as I looked through a kaleidoscope. An entire world inside this small object, with its infinity of forms and colors, made me dream.

4. Urban landscape – Germany
Casual geometry. A three dimensional space converted into a two dimensional urban composition composed by casual geometries, lines, and grey and white oblique stains. I like the different planes, dynamics, and textural feeling.

5. Optical
Op-art is always magic, dynamic, intense, and sometimes provocative for me. Optical effects makes me reflect about the perception of space. This is an optical disc from an op art exhibition in Frankfurt in 2007.

Marni Elyse Katz is a Contributing Editor at Design Milk. She lives in Boston where she contributes regularly to local publications and writes her own interior design blog, StyleCarrot.