Barlas Baylar Lighting

Elegant lighting from a dream of the future.

Barlas Baylar is a New York City furniture designer most famous for his interpretative woodwork that manages to integrate the traditional with the modern, the natural with the manufactured.  But he’s also been making a big splash with lighting fixtures, for which work he is adding to his already impressive following.  His Monastery chandelier is a fine example of Baylar’s minimalist aesthetics that bring organic forms to industrial materials.  Reminiscent of ancient chain mail coifs, its modern styling renders it at once classic and contemporary.  And that is what’s so striking about his designs: they arrest the attention by the sheer uncanny familiarity of it all.  Appearing antique yet sleekly modern, seeming organic but surely assembled, viewers are held in a kind of intellectual suspense because of the interplay between dissonances sensory and cognitive, between vision and thought – is it hard?  Is it soft?  What is it?  A chandelier.  Which objects, our minds tell us, are of hard and cold metal and glass.  Not warm and sensuous, as Baylar has made them.  The only concession left to our memories has been the familiar quality of metal’s inimitable luster.

Perhaps nowhere is Barlas Baylar Lighting more epitomized than in the Atlantis chandelier.  Rendered of four miles’ nickel chaining, this series really subvert traditional notions of metal, conjuring forth the softest, most sensuous forms yet to be seen in a Barlas Baylar design.  All Atlantises trade hard reality and coolness for dreamlike organic forms and warmth.  Indeed, the light itself seems warmer when emanating from an Atlantis!  Glass and metal are made to seem as fabric in a personal epiphany of sense and intellect that erupts as an homage and a reverence.  In his company showrooms at Hudson Furniture such visions are promoted in stone, wood, metal, and glass, beautifully blending form and function, carefully balancing style and substance.  And so such art is called utilitarian art, practical items which bring the feeling of beauty, joy, and truth to everyday tasks.  And so such furniture transform interiors into veritable landscapes, suggesting the world without from the world within, trading theory for reality and balancing form with function.

And so has Baylar achieved a following of upscale interiors.  But Baylar’s flowing organic forms still puzzle us, even as we become admirers upon recognizing their artistry and craftsmanship, lingering in the mind as an uncanny experience.  We wonder why we are persuaded, but we are happy to have been taken to such a beautiful place.