In conjunction with Paola Gandolfi‘s solo exhibition entitled Reportage at Galleria Alessandro Bagnai, ongoing until 13th January 2024, Galleria Antonella Villanova presents the second appointment of the traveling project Trésor-en-valise* which this time sees as the protagonist a nucleus of works in limited edition created by the Italian architect, artist and designer Gaetano Pesce for Galleria Luisa Delle Piane.
Gaetano Pesce is one of the most multifaceted and prolific figures on the international design scene. Protagonist and active promoter, around the mid-1960s, of the linguistic revolutions born within Radical Design – from which his distinctive and highly personal expressive alphabet would take shape – from the beginning of his career, Pesce approached design with a creative freedom so extreme as to camouflage the design rigor that always underlies each of his creations: design beyond the standard, that is, as an experimental, hedonistic and at the same time methodological art form, which admits and exalts diversity, imperfection and, sometimes, randomness.
The pioneering scope of Gaetano Pesce’s research and work can be read between the lines of his constant experimentation with materials, the most innovative ones, and in his predilection for plastic ones which, malleable and at times unpredictable, allow the author to investigate the multiple communicative possibilities and seductive in shape and color.
The resins, in particular, combining matter, pigment and transparency, have allowed Pesce to express himself contextually on multiple fronts and on multiple dimensions: on the front of three-dimensionality, through idolatrous sculptural forms; on that of two-dimensionality, through the invention of narrative iconographies; on that of spatiality, creating everyday objects in the form of devices capable of shaking domestic reality; and finally on that of light, exploiting the squint of dense and translucent matter.
The lamps of the “Gaetana” series – expressly designed for Galleria Luisa Delle Piane (Milan), and now exhibited for the first time in Florence after the Milanese debut during the Design Week 2023 – embody exactly the polymorphic and multivalent character that animates Pesce’s works. Made with sheets of paste-dyed resin in different chromatic shades and placed like soft drapes on the lighting fixtures, the lamps reveal to the eye dynamic, colorful and crystalline shapes that intuitively refer to an “underwater” image: that of evanescent floating jellyfish, capable of transforming the perception and mood of the domestic landscape.
Also on display is a piece from the “Nobody’s Perfect” series (2005), a cabinet in colored resin, produced by ZeroDisegno, which blends functionality and expressiveness, drowning the entire shape in an image: the profile of a face which, laid horizontally on the upper part of the piece of furniture, accentuates its formal complexity – intentionally not perfect – while proposing a double and unprecedented reading of the work which, from being an object of use, is transformed into an evocative horizon.
