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Cherry, aluminum, and cloth sketch a new language of domestic ritual.
Step into Friedman Benda’s Chelsea gallery and the smell of freshly planed cherry meets the cool flash of brushed aluminum—two materials that rarely share the same sentence, let alone the same table. For their first U.S. solo outing, Milan-based duo Formafantasma (Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin) begin with the cabinetmaker’s most basic unit, the plank, and treat it less as raw stock than as a witness. Cherry carries a long American memory: Shaker meetinghouses, Nakashima slabs, the hidden bones of mid-century case goods. By resawing it into thick staves, then sliding sheets of anodized aluminum between the boards, the designers stage a quiet debate about what “home” feels like in an era when a touchscreen is the object we touch most. The aluminum reads as a perpetual present—our phones, our laptops—while the cherry insists on a slower clock, its growth rings counting decades in a single swipe of the plane.
Across the room, that dialogue continues in a family of desks, low tables, and lighting pieces. Rectangular LED panels hover above the wood like handheld screens somehow granted the right to stay. Their glow is softened by textile shades—linen dyed in muted earths—reminding us that light, too, was once filtered through fabric long before diodes and acrylic diffusers. Formafantasma calls this “recuperating overlooked craft,” a nod to the unseen lineage of domestic textiles historically woven, stitched, and laundered by women. The gesture lands without didactic weight; a simple cloth draped over a dining surface shifts the wooden plane from object to occasion, ready for bread, conversation, or the quiet choreography of setting a table.
The pieces avoid easy nostalgia; they stand comfortably in the present. Joinery is exposed but never fussy; aluminum is brushed, not polished, keeping the reflection matte and the mood unforced. In a city addicted to novelty, Formation offers something rarer: furniture that slows the pulse without retreating from the contemporary world. It asks us to notice the grain, the anodized edge, the way a modest cloth can turn light into atmosphere—and, by extension, to notice how we inhabit our own rooms and how those rooms quietly inhabit us.
