FELIPE PANTONE AND ETAI OPEN PARALLEL PRACTICES FRIDAY

Felipe Pantone and Los Angeles designer Etai Drori open Parallel Practices, Tailored Structures and Kinetic Surfaces, at Albertz Benda's gallery on Marmont Lane this Friday, July 17. Pantone brings the kinetic, chromatic wall works he has built a career on. Drori brings mid century furniture he has spent months sourcing across Los Angeles, then reworked by hand.

That is the whole premise, and it is sharper than it first sounds. A tailor and a painter are not usually asked to finish each other's sentences. Here they are, on the same walls, for three weeks, at a house gallery that used to be somebody's living room.

Etai Drori Left Louis Vuitton Scraps for Mid Century Chairs

Etai Drori has spent a decade cutting things apart before putting them back together. He built his reputation reworking Louis Vuitton scraps into custom bags and lighters for a client list that reads like a festival lineup: Billie Eilish, Ariana Grande, Travis Scott, Rosalia, J Balvin, Chiara Ferragni. He launched his own menswear label, Etai, out of the Los Angeles Fashion District in March 2024.

Finally Offline covered his most visible crossover in June, when Formula 1 pressed 3D printed texture into a racing capsule with the designer ahead of the British Grand Prix. Parallel Practices is his first formal gallery exhibition, and he did not soften the process for it. He digitally maps each furniture piece before he touches it, then reworks the frame by hand, the same deconstruct first, rebuild second logic he applied to handbags.

Custom Fabric Turns This Furniture Into Sculpture

Pantone's contribution is the surface, not the frame. He designed custom fabric for the reworked furniture, produced by Limonta, the Italian textile house that mills jacquards for couture houses. His wall works fill the rest of the gallery, the gradient heavy, chromatic geometry that has carried his name since his years painting as Pant1 in Torrevieja and Valencia, Spain.

Pantone was born in Buenos Aires in 1986 and raised in southeastern Spain, the Argentine Spanish backstory that shows up in nearly every writeup of his kinetic work, from the Long Beach Museum of Art's Vitality and Verve in 2016 to Saatchi Gallery's Beyond the Streets in London. None of that history explains why he agreed to paint fabric for someone else's furniture instead of another wall. The fabric answers it. Limonta does not weave for artists who are dabbling.

8260 Marmont Lane Has Hosted Pantone Twice Before

Parallel Practices is Pantone's third show at this exact address, not his first. Metallic Contact ran here in the spring of 2022, and Albertz Benda has invited him back since. A gallery does not repeat an artist unless the work sells.

Albertz Benda opened its Los Angeles house gallery in 2021, four years after Thorsten Albertz and Marc Benda founded the original in Chelsea. Benda still runs Friedman Benda, a design gallery, on the other coast. A design dealer and an art dealer sharing a business card is not incidental. It is why reworked furniture can hang beside fine art paintings here instead of sitting in a showroom, and why 8260 Marmont Lane, a converted West Hollywood house behind the Chateau, reads as a home rather than a white cube.

A Furniture Show Is Not the Easy Collab

A wall mural and a merch drop would have been the safer pairing. Furniture is slower, more expensive to produce, and harder to sell in an edition of one. Drori and Pantone chose it anyway, which is the real story here, not the celebrity client list or the kinetic brand name.

This is the same city that spent June watching Joshua Vides wrap real cars in flat black illusion at the Petersen, another artist whose work only registers once it stops looking like the object it started as. Los Angeles keeps handing gallery walls to people trained outside the gallery system, fashion, automotive, streetwear, and the walls keep holding attendance. That is not a scheduling coincidence. It is a city with more collectors who buy sneakers than oil paintings, and the galleries have started building shows around that fact instead of pretending it is not true.

Parallel Practices runs through August 8. Two names, one address, zero overlap in training, and Limonta weaving the single fabric both of them needed to finish the work. Call it early, not overdue. The art market has not caught up to fashion designers building gallery careers yet, and Albertz Benda already tested that bet once, with 2022's Metallic Contact, before repeating it this week with a furniture show that is harder to sell than either artist's last one.