Halations, Rafi Ajl’s second solo exhibition at The Future Perfect, brings together new furniture, sculptural glass, and his first works in lighting. Through cast metal, intricately worked wood, and luminous glass, Ajl explores how an object’s materials and form shape the atmosphere around it. The exhibition takes its title from the glow that appears when light extends beyond its source.
Ajl describes the exhibition as an exercise in “crude sophistication,” a tension between raw material expression and exacting construction. His monumental glass forms emerge from more than five years of experimentation, requiring six people working in close choreography. Throughout the exhibition, traces of making remain visible: overlapping wood inlays turn checks and knots into intricate patchworks, while aluminum cast into wooden molds retains the texture left by burning wood. Nickel plating lends these craggy surfaces an unexpected warmth and depth.
New seating extends this language into forms that appear almost animated. The Dancer series balances graceful cast metal legs with structured leather upholstery, while Into the Woods chairs reinterpret a simple flea market find through ornamental carving, deerskin upholstery, and constellations of cast metal. Opalescent glass vessels recall the curves and glints of shell interiors, while rough metal surfaces suggest lunar landscapes.
The exhibition also introduces Windows, a pair of sconces that marks Ajl’s lighting debut. Drawing on a historical method of making window glass, he cuts and reheats completed Saguaro Vessels, opening them into textured panes. Each piece is effectively made twice, a finished vessel transformed into something new. Minimal supporting structures and fine stainless steel mesh create what Ajl describes as “floating planes of light in space.” The glass retains the irregularities of its earlier form, catching light along its folds and edges and expressing the idea at the heart of Halations: “inner radiance, letting things glow.”
