Rick Tegelaar's Mesh Screens: A Study in Light, Material, and Restraint

The objects themselves are easy to miss. At Spotti, the contemporary design gallery tucked into the Viale Piave end of Milan's design district, the new screens by the Dutch designer Rick Tegelaar read, at a glance, as drapery — a wall of warm brown falling from ceiling to floor. The illusion lasts about four seconds. A hand pressed against the surface meets something with the give of stiff paper and the memory of metal, and a knuckle run across it finds a lattice so fine that the eye is doing the work of closing it shut.

That two-second recalibration is, increasingly, what a Tegelaar object is for. The designer has built a career on a small set of moves — birch veneer, brass wire, the kind of joinery that looks decorative until you realise it is structural — and on a particular kind of patient. The screens, exhibited at Spotti in late June 2026, extend a body of work that treats transparency as a material in its own right, and treats the act of seeing through a thing as a design problem worth several years of iteration.

An object that earns its restraint

The screens are made of birch veneer and brass wire, assembled into a mesh and mounted on a slender frame. That description does most of the work, and the gallery — unusually — does not load it with marketing language. The room is dim, the screens are lit from the side, and the wall behind them does the rest: a soft, filtered brown over whatever is on the other side. There is no audio. There is no video. There is a small brass plaque.

Tegelaar's practice has long leaned on this register. Earlier work — the Moss lamps, the Halfsphere lighting pieces, the rack and shelving systems for a small group of European manufacturers — has been built on a similar premise: that the interesting question is rarely what a material looks like, and almost always what it does when you take it close to a limit. A birch veneer is, at heart, a sheet of wood thinned down until it is barely a sheet. A brass wire is a metal pulled into a diameter the eye almost cannot resolve. The mesh that results sits at the seam between those two states. It is heavy enough to cast a shadow. It is open enough to see through.

The screens take that proposition and turn it vertical. The result is less a piece of furniture than a piece of architecture — a wall that is not quite a wall, a curtain that is not quite a curtain, a screen in the technical sense (the cathode-ray kind, the mesh kind, the kind that filters light and signal) without ever quite admitting it is one.

Why the Milan design world is paying attention

Milan is, in the second quarter of every year, the most concentrated design marketplace on the continent. The Salone del Mobile fair and the week of city-wide exhibitions that surrounds it draw a specific audience: gallery owners, design directors for European furniture houses, a small international press corps, and a longer tail of collectors for whom a Tegelaar piece is a known quantity rather than a discovery. The fair itself, organised by Salone del Mobile.Milano, has run annually since 1961; Spotti, founded in 1987 and long associated with the Dutch and Scandinavian design wave the city helped popularise, sits comfortably inside that ecosystem.

What the gallery has chosen to programme in 2026 is notable less for its volume than for its texture. The Tegelaar screens share the room with a tightly edited set of European makers whose work also turns on the relationship between hand and material. The point of the programme is not to stage a statement. It is to suggest a continuity: that a particular approach to furniture, one rooted in the Low Countries in the 1990s and 2000s, is still producing objects worth a long look. The screens are the most explicit case.

There is a counter-read worth taking seriously, too. Milan design week is, structurally, a trade show with the cultural authority of a biennial. A small screen at a small gallery can read, fairly, as a quiet gesture inside a noisy marketplace. Tegelaar has, on the record, been a designer of objects that move from gallery to production in slow, deliberate arcs. The screens may yet become a commercial line. The current showing is not, however, structured as a product launch. It is structured as an exhibition — lighting, plinth, plaque — and the gallery has clearly chosen to let it stay that way for now.

A structural argument about light

What the screens actually do, as objects, is force a particular negotiation between a room and the people inside it. A solid wall, a heavy curtain, a glass partition — each makes a different argument about what should be visible and what should not. A Tegelaar mesh makes a more ambivalent argument. You can see through it. You can also not see through it; at certain angles and at certain light levels, the mesh closes up and the room on the other side disappears into a soft, grainy brown.

That ambivalence is, increasingly, what the design press means when it talks about "transparency" as a category. The screens are not transparent in the architectural sense — they will not give you daylight. They are transparent in a perceptual sense, in that they make the act of seeing something the room's primary activity. The brass wire picks up light and throws it back; the birch veneer absorbs it. The result is an object that is, in any given moment, more or less opaque than you expect.

In a city where the dominant design conversation of the past two Salone cycles has been about sustainability, materials provenance, and the carbon cost of furniture, this is also — quietly — a position. A mesh screen is, in material terms, a near-zero-waste object: a sheet of veneer and a coil of wire, woven, hung, lit. It is also an object that will not be replaced every five years. The point of buying one is that you do not replace it.

What is at stake

For a designer of Tegelaar's profile, an exhibition at Spotti is a continuation rather than a break. The screens do not need to convert a new audience, only to remind the existing one that the studio is still asking the same careful questions it has been asking for a decade. The risk, in a fair week saturated with new launches, is that the work reads as repetition rather than refinement. The case the gallery is making is that refinement is the point.

The honest uncertainty in the story is small but real. The screens are recent work, and the documentation available is the documentation the gallery has chosen to release. Whether the project travels from the Spotti room into a wider product line, and on what timeline, is not something the public record settles. What is settled is the question of whether the object is worth standing in front of. On the evidence of a single dim room in late June 2026, the answer is yes.

This article is published as part of Monexus's culture coverage, where design is read as a slow industry and an archive of recent decisions. Where wire reporting reads a Milan show for its market implications, this publication reads it for the objects.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://t.me/salon_magazine
• https://t.me/salon_magazine
• https://t.me/salon_magazine