VIRGA

archaic light

VIRGA is a series of lights developed by lighting designer Petros Dermatas for luminous dreams. An interplay between the primal and the futuristic.

VIRGA’s timeless forms —straight, curved, and angular— possess a purity and simplicity that transcends modern complexity. VIRGA draws inspiration from early human marks to primitive forms of lighting used from the archaic to the early modern period: lights than served both practical and symbolic purposes.

The quality of the materials speak to this connection. VIRGA’s use of metal rods and delicate filaments mirrors how early tools and artifacts were forged from the simplest elements of nature. These forms, echo the connection humans had with their environment their tools, their rituals, and survival mechanisms.

From early civilizations, light was considered as a sacred force. The ritualistic connection to light played an important role in spiritual practices and communal activities. VIRGA’s designs emit this primal energy—like oil lamps, and rush lights the designs reminisce the earliest human attempts to control and harness light for survival and ceremony.

Suspended in space or placed on surfaces the designs evoke a sense of both tension and balance while extraordinary lightness characterizes the whole collection. Delicate LED filaments at the tips of the rods, glow like stars or embers from a forgotten age, transforming metal forms into radiant objects of art.

The rods, are not just aesthetic—they serve as conduits for low-voltage electricity that is needed to ignite the filaments.

VIRGA is a celebration of opposites: the archaic and the futuristic, the grounded and the weightless, the elemental and the technological. More than a collection of luminaires VIRGA is a poetic interplay of light, material, and space.

The luminaires, like relics of an imagined past, feel almost magical in modernity, echoing humanity’s earliest illuminations.