.MGX Design products

About Damned.MGX
Dutch architect Luc Merx’s lampshade is an algorithmic mass of writhing nudes that recalls the classical motif of the fall of the damned. He imagines the lamp hanging above a dining table, the shock of the frozen, terrified bodies disturbing diners with age-old questions of guilt and morality, issues usually kept behind closed doors. By producing the piece with Materialise’s technology, Merx also has another historical reference in mind: “The lamp is a masterpiece of virtuosity, similar to that of 18th-century ivory furniture,” he says. “But the difference is that this is not the result of our virtuosity, but that of a computer.”
The lampshade appears as a hovering mass of ornaments, opulent and bombastic. When looked at from closer by it dissolves into single bodies, which are twisted in fear and seem to be frozen in falling.
Their rhythmic order becomes slightly perplexing and finally renders the bodies an ornament. Softly, like the fleshy parts of the bodies, legs and stomachs are reflecting the light. Because of the shadows the bodies cast on themselves, only parts of them appear in the foreground. Only Fragments of the lit inner part of the lamp are distinguishable. The aspects of the lit core are changing strongly whenever the observer changes his position. These movements of the observer transform the stiff bodies into dynamic objects.
The association with the fall of the damned, a metaphor for guilt and punishment gives the lamp a certain amount of ambivalence: is it a moralistic message, an act of formalism or both?
The Damned Lampshade is one of the works in which Gagat international reactivates historic imagery as a reference for their designs. The design of this lamp undermines several taboos imposed on design in the 20th century: it is figurative, ornamental, and narrative. The new questions about the possibilities of forms posed by this originate in a new understanding of technology. Technology no longer generates the forces, which determine the design of goods, but it enables an incredible range of possibilities and thus creates a new freedom of form.
Our answer to this new freedom is not the voluntary self-restriction usually applied in modern design. Instead we choose to roam freely in the myriads of possibilities given to us. Seen in this way design reflects the situation of the designer himself.

Technical Sheet [.PDF - 153Kb]