Antoni Arola: light as an act of enduring beauty

13 December 2025

Antoni Arola is a designer with a unique sensitivity to light, materials, and beauty as cultural values. Although Spanish, he has developed a strong aesthetic and spiritual connection to Japan — which he describes as a “Japanese soul” that has been present since childhood — over the years, Airola has developed a design approach in which the lamp is not a simple object, but a generator of atmosphere.

His work ranges from light installations to the most refined technical systems, and is distinguished by a constant search for visual simplicity capable of concealing complex processes.

His career has led him to collaborate with companies such as Vibia and Santa & Cole, and to exhibit internationally, including Tokyo, a city with which he has a particularly intense creative and personal connection.

How did the collaboration with Vibia, and specifically the Circus collection, come about?

Circus is a very ambitious and extensive project. The goal was to create a system capable of illuminating spaces in different ways, suited to different contexts: a home, a restaurant, indoor and outdoor spaces.

It was a very long project, precisely because the final simplicity of the product doesn’t reveal the complex process behind it. It’s a multi-product, or rather a system, and the entire effort was to translate this complexity into a simple and clean visual language.

How does your approach to design is close to Vibia’s approach?

Vibia is a unique company: despite being large, it maintains a very direct, almost familial, dialogue with the designer. This is rare, because in large companies, everything is usually diluted. Here, however, there’s a concrete dialogue, and above all, great technical ability: the means and expertise to truly realize what you imagine. This is a luxury for a designer.

You were recently featured in an exhibition curated by Santa&Cole at the Karimoku Center in Tokyo: can you tell us more about this experience?

The exhibition was born from the proposal of a Japanese architect who visited my studio in Barcelona, fell in love with the place and my work, and invited me to exhibit in the Karimoku Center, a three-story building.

We organized a multi-layered exhibition: the light installations on the ground floor, the lamps in the center, and at the top a space dedicated to the way and space I work in.

Recreating the studio was challenging because it’s large, chaotic, and full of objects; we solved this by combining videos, interviews, and a series of working models. The result was very evocative.

Did this experience have a special meaning for you?

Very much. For two years, I thought I’d like to do an exhibition in Tokyo; it’s a childhood dream. And then it really happened, almost magically. It’s as if many threads of my professional life have come together. Sometimes I think about the exhibition, and it seems like a dream.

When designing lamps or lighting systems, what are your priorities?

For me, the most important thing is not the object itself, but the light it generates. I look inside and out: what atmosphere, what climate does that object create? First, I think about the light, then the object. The object is a necessity to be resolved, the consequence.

Are there values you feel you carry forward in your work?

Beauty is fundamental. It’s a cultural value that can transform people: when you enter the Pantheon in Rome, you change; something inside us moves. I don’t want to compare my work to that, but I deeply believe in the role of beauty in everyday life. Then there’s sustainability, which for me means, above all, creating objects that last a long time: 50, 100 years. Durability is sustainability.

Is there a lamp, not designed by you, that has particularly inspired you?

There are many, but if I had to name a master, I’d say Achille Castiglioni. Not so much for the form, which I sometimes like a lot and other times less, but for his way of working with light. He explored luminous matter in a singular, poetic, and intelligent way. He’s a great inspiration.

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