It’s not as easy as it looks to achieve a design that perfectly blends legibility with heart-fluttering poetry. Catalan designer Eugeni Quitllet makes it look as natural as light and shadow, though, and his new Satellight lamp for Foscarini is the ideal illustration.

Satellight is simple in shape and immediately understandable as an object. But it’s also the embodiment of poetic lightness. A luminous globe is suspended in a cone-like void that magically appears to catch the light. Foscarini refers to the visual effect as being similar to the moon in the night sky, or “a fragment of light that flies, seeking freedom.”

Quitllet refers to himself as a disoñador – a Spanish contraction of designer and dreamer. As can be detected throughout his portfolio, he imagines a gravity-free future with what he describes as “incredible aesthetics summarised in a combination of digital precision and flowing curves.”

The apparently floating handcrafted diffuser of Satellight is blown glass in a milky white colour and a satin finish. A dimmable LED light source transmits a warm, gentle light that generates subtle reflections on the shiny transparent blown-glass enclosure. Satellight is available in a table version (in two sizes) and a suspension version. It is in the former that Quitllet’s gravity-free vision can be seen most strongly, with the luminous ‘core’ apparently magically held aloft.

Perhaps Quitllet says in best in prose:

“I dreamed I was taking a piece of the sun to
share it with the world,
holding a ball of light in my hands.
I captured the light under a glass bell so it
couldn’t escape
And I kept it for you.

 The form and concept of this light represents
light’s pressure to escape and return to the sun.
Satellight is a piece of light that is never trapped
and continues to travel.”

– Eugeni Quitllet

In Singapore, Foscarini is available from Xtra.