Milan Preview: Kartell’s New Disappearing Furniture

With the 2011 Milan Furniture Fair just weeks away, our inboxes are filling up with breathless press releases on groundbreaking chairs! Revolutionary couches! Mind-bending dish racks! So far, though, everything's been pretty... meh.

One glowing exception: Tokujin Yoshioka's new Invisibles Light series for Kartell, which looks like a furniture set sprung from the hands of Houdini.

This isn't the first time we've described Yoshioka's work that way. Yoshioka, who hails from Japan, is a master of illusion -- a genius who can turn ordinary materials from glass to plastic to bird feathers (!) into extraordinary, otherworldly designs.

Here, he used acrylic to make chairs and tables the objects of a domestic disappearing act. More precisely, he combined the material with ur-minimal forms -- note the complete absence of obtuse and acute angles -- to create furniture that appears, from certain perspectives, as less of something you'd actually sit in than a 2-D line drawing you'd hang on the wall.

[Images courtesy of Tokujin Yoshioka]