Meet the Sicilian Artist Behind Instagram’s Favorite Pleated Lamps

Zoe Ruffner
Updated

Meet the Sicilian Artist Behind Instagram’s Favorite Pleated Lamps

<cite class="credit">Photo: Courtesy of Oscar Piccolo</cite>
Photo: Courtesy of Oscar Piccolo
<cite class="credit">Photo: Courtesy of Oscar Piccolo</cite>
Photo: Courtesy of Oscar Piccolo
<cite class="credit">Photo: Courtesy of Oscar Piccolo</cite>
Photo: Courtesy of Oscar Piccolo
<cite class="credit">Photo: Courtesy of Oscar Piccolo</cite>
Photo: Courtesy of Oscar Piccolo

When I speak with 22-year-old interior designer and artist Oscar Piccolo, the anxiety in his voice is palpable: “I’m getting my grades tomorrow,” the recent Chelsea College of Arts graduate says over the phone from his home in London. But while his classmates may still be nervously plotting their futures, Piccolo’s career is already well underway. In addition to designing sets for Carlota Guerrero, the Spanish photographer behind Solange’s now-iconic A Seat at the Table imagery, and selling his ceramic portrait plates to It Brit retailer Alex Eagle, he’s created a series of lamps that have spread like wildfire on Instagram. Today, his nearly 11,000 followers are in luck: The light pieces are finally available to purchase online.

<cite class="credit">Photo: Courtesy of Oscar Piccolo / @oscarpiccolo</cite>
Photo: Courtesy of Oscar Piccolo / @oscarpiccolo

“I’ve always had this obsession with lamps—the way they interact with space through light and create shadows and subtleties,” says Piccolo, who long envisioned a pleated lampshade that he never could quite execute—that is until one fortuitous after-school outing. As the story goes, he peeked inside a local charity shop—a “cave” brimming with “different objects from different decades” and came across a hat, its tucks and folds similar to the images that had been filling his mind. “As soon as I saw it I figured it out,” he recalls. “There were two in the shop and I had only bought one, so a week and a half later I went back and was like, ‘I need both hats!’ ”

After taking the toppers to his studio and “playing with cardboard and masking tape and sticking things together and dismantling them and putting them together and seeing what shape they got,” Piccolo, who cites the Mexican architect Luis Barragán and his “attention to detail and the way someone interacts with space” as inspiration, landed on the form that is launching today: a pleated canvas shade—available in a handful of hushed hues—that sits atop a curved iron base crafted by a metalworker in Palermo, Italy. “I wanted to make a subtle lamp that’s not too imposing,” Piccolo says. “One that’s beautiful, even when it’s off.”

<cite class="credit">Photo: Courtesy of Oscar Piccolo / @oscarpiccolo</cite>
Photo: Courtesy of Oscar Piccolo / @oscarpiccolo

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