Stories Begin with Details: Frelly for What’s in a Lamp?
Pastel colors, clean lines, and surreal worlds where dreams and reality meet. For What’s in a Lamp?, Frelly builds a series of images in which each Foscarini lamp becomes a hat to be worn, turning design objects into living presences that reshape the space around the people who wear them.
Enrico Focarelli Barone, known as Frelly, creates images that spring from a sensation. “I start with a detail — a figure, a light — and let everything else emerge, poised between reality and imagination,” he says. An illustrator specializing in editorial design and conceptual illustration, Frelly has created a visual language characterized by limited color palettes, large swaths of color, and figures suspended in a balance between reality and imagination.
In the series he created for What’s in a Lamp?, Foscarini lamps become hats worn by women from around the world. Not decorative objects, but presences that alter the silhouette and the perception of space. In each illustration, a suspended moment is thus created, where form speaks before the story.
How would you describe your work to someone who can’t see it?
I draw images that grow from a feeling. I start with a detail — a figure, a light — and let everything else emerge, in a balance between reality and imagination. Color plays a central role: a few tones, broad expanses of flat color, to build atmosphere and emotion.
How does a story become an illustration?
I usually start without a clear story in mind. I begin drawing and let myself be guided — at a certain point, the image itself starts to speak.
You interpreted Foscarini’s lamps as hats. Where did that idea come from?
They depict frozen moments. In this case, I also drew inspiration from real-life poses and references, letting the shapes—of the body, the clothes, and the lamps—guide me.
What stories do the illustrations tell?
Raccontano momenti sospesi. In questo caso sono partito anche da pose e riferimenti reali, lasciando che fossero le forme — del corpo, degli abiti e delle lampade — a guidarmi.
The women wearing the lamp-hats come from all over the world. How do you avoid falling into stereotypes when working on something like that?
By working through subtraction. I avoid details that are too explicit and look for something more essential — leaving room for interpretation.
How do you build a story starting from an object, a space, a situation?
I start drawing and putting elements into relationship with one another. Sometimes all it takes is a small shift, and the image begins to suggest a story on its own.
How do your project concepts come together?
From drawing. I follow an initial intuition and let it develop as I go, until it becomes a clear idea.
And how do they turn into finished illustrations?
Through simplification and a focus on balance. Few elements, large areas of flat color, and a tight palette — usually four or five colors — to give the image strength and coherence.
How do you know when an illustration is finished and working?
When there’s nothing left to take away and everything is in balance: shapes, space, and color.
What story would you most love to illustrate, and why?
I couldn’t give you a definitive answer — there are so many stories waiting to be told. I just hope it’s a good one.
What does creativity mean to you?
For me, creativity means starting from an intuition and letting it grow by following your emotions, drawing inspiration from everything around you. It’s the ability to turn what lives in your mind into something real.
Discover the collaboration with Enrico Focarelli and the full series on the Instagram channel @foscarinilamps, and explore all interpretations of the What’s in a Lamp? project, where international artists are invited to freely interpret light and Foscarini collections.
Silent images, domestic settings, a light that sparks unexpected possibilities. For What’s in a Lamp?, Marianna Tomaselli creates a series of illustrations in which Foscarini lamps become the starting point of a visual narrative, where light generates relationships, atmospheres, and subtle shifts in meaning.
Illustratore, animatore e storyteller Brian Rea entra nell’universo di What’s in a lamp? trasformando le lampade Foscarini in presenze vive, intime e silenziose. Un progetto dove luce e personaggi dialogano con delicatezza, sorpresa e immaginazione.
A project by Massimo Gardone for Foscarini investigates the potential of artificial intelligence as a tool of expression, but always guided by a sensitive, conscious human touch. A story in which technology is a means of amplifying the human gaze, where settings generated by AI contain lamps photographed in their physical presence.
For What’s in a Lamp?, Spanish illustrator and art director Jorge Arévalo portrays Foscarini’s lamps and designers with his unmistakable style: essential lines, bold colours, and graphic elegance. A suspended dialogue between the object of design and the mind that imagines it.
For the What’s in a Lamp? project, Italian artist Beppe Conti imagines lamps not simply as sources of light, but as instruments that reveal the invisible. In his digital collages, fragments and hidden layers emerge from the darkness, shaped by the light of Foscarini lamps into dreamlike spaces.
With his unmistakable style defined by essential shapes and bold colors Peter Grundy transforms Foscarini lamps into visual archetypes of the concepts and values that define the brand’s identity for the editorial project What’s in a Lamp?. An exercise in synthesis and vision that invites us to see light not only as a source but as meaning itself.
Helen Musselwhite’s artistic universe is made of paper cutouts, folds, and shadows that narrate the wonder of the natural world. For What’s in a Lamp?, the artist reinterprets some of Foscarini’s lamps, transforming them into dreamlike paper landscapes.
After the interpretation of the luminator which led to the Chiaroscura lamp, Alberto and Francesco Meda rethink a lighting classic for Foscarini: the chandelier.
Francesca Lanzavecchia knows exactly what she wants: to design objects that never fail to make an impression. Not just a matter of aesthetics, but of that intense emotional resonance her projects attempt to set in motion. In an interview, she talks Allumette and Tilia, the two chandeliers she has designed for Foscarini.
Mattia Cimadoro and Giuseppe Mauro, who lead Dordoni Studio, talk in this interview about Etoile: a project that embodies an ethereal lightness and a restrained yet confident elegance, combined with a discreet and sophisticated ambient light.
