Ayala Serfaty’s Janus

For the past 3 decades, internationally acclaimed Israeli artist Ayala Serfaty has been creating poetic functional objects, handcrafted in her Tel-Aviv-based studio. She has made her name with two distinctive sculptural series: SOMA, lights made of refined glass rods; and RAPA, organic furniture hand-molded in felt. It is always the crafts of the ancient world, its materials, processes, and the spirit of antiquity, which have become the core of her interest, research, and inspiration. Ayala has been successful in interpreting those ancient techniques with the ability to bring them into the world of contemporary design through concepts, silhouettes, and scales that represent the zeitgeist and respond to forms of living and the interior of today. She has made those transformations without losing the authenticity and identity of the crafts.

Her new concept series JANUS will be launched at Design Miami by Maison Gerard. Named after the two-faced Roman god of time and transitions, Ayala presents her first exploration with another ancient technique: lost-wax bronze casting, a technique dated to the fifth century BC. The new series manifests her approach to materials and her quest to keep expanding her research and grow her oeuvre. In JANUS, she continues to investigate cellular structures, which she started in the 90s. However, while then her language was rooted in the world underwater and notions of fertility, while recreating feminine and sensual sensibilities, today, she revisits the same sources, but with a fresh outlook. JANUS is a series of sculptural coffee tables, inspired by the interdependence of what appear to be opposites such as past and future; lightness and stability; refinement and spaciousness.

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