Rose Easton is exceptionally proud to announce that Louis Morlæ has been awarded the illy Present Future Prize 2025 for our presentation at Artissima. He will realise a solo exhibition at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Autumn 2026.


Text by Gary Zhexi Zhang

SFB stands for Sidefall Bag, which the artist Louis Morlæ conceived as a “delusional safety device” designed to catch the body in freefall after gravity has shifted, like a science fiction scene in which the ship’s artificial gravity suddenly malfunctions. For SFB2, the latest in the series, Morlæ rotates the entire space by 90 degrees as if clicking through the axial parameters on a piece of architectural software.

Louis Morlæ is a product designer-turned-artist who continues to straddle the poles of meticulous material realism and fantastical conceptual fictions. On one hand, the proposition is playful, synthetic, ironic. On the other hand, each seam, strap and handle is attended to with an engineer’s eye for functional detail – one can picture the IKEA-style user’s manual. Like the first model, SFB2 is made of sewn, silicone- coated nylon 66, the same material used in real “inflatable restraint systems.” Redesigning the airbag, Morlæ stages the fair booth as a simulated crash test site for an unknown physics, at once mundane and uncanny, violent and whimsical.

The smooth-coated textile of SFB2 resembles a 3D object belonging to a virtual, computer-generated world, rendered as smooth spheroids. Periodically, the volumes inflate, filling their lungs before air pressure escapes through vents fitted with harmonica reeds. In their bathetic, discordant deflation, one discovers Morlæ’s taste for the anthropomorphic absurd, a vaudevillian sense of animation that feels as much at home in puppetry as in 3D game worlds. This clown-walk between the physical and the digital well captures our contemporary confusions, in which the direct lived reality feels increasingly anachronistic in a world of accelerating symbols and signs.

Between inflations, a prophylactic technology lies in wait, sagging with potential. Is this precaution a comfort or a threat? The pneumatic whimsy SFB2 recalls the work of late ‘60s architectural radicals Ant Farm, whose inflatable, psychedelic designs for living – more bulbous agitprop than buildings – captured the spirit of ecological utopianism, Sputnik and “Spaceship Earth”. At the same time, the skewed virtual placement of SFB2 alludes to a more sinister, affectless discombobulation.

As much as an unsuspected crash or fall violently breaks the flow of experience with a jolt of the real, there is something hyperreal about an airbag, a voluminous object that instantaneously “appears” on the event of a collision, like an object spawning mid-game. For SFB2, Morlæ was inspired by “noclip mode,” a game development setting where collisions with hard surfaces are disabled, turning the player into a floating camera through 3D space, traveling through walls and floors like a hand passing through a projector beam. “Noclipping” can also be the product of a glitch, tripping over or tricking through the constraints of architecture, accidentally breaking the terms and conditions of reality – into a momentary divinity. Agnostic to scale and orientation, SFB2 is a kind of crash-test equipment adequate to disorienting times like ours, in which the question is not only when things will collapse, but in which direction.

Morlæ