04 September 2009

print

On a visit to Elica, Gaetano Pesce talks about his work


zoom

zoom

zoom

zoom

zoom

zoom

“Putting the personal into the product”

An explosion of colour featuring a particularly emphatic red, a basket overflowing with fruit and vegetables, bread and cheese –  those simple basic ingredients that we use everyday to prepare our meals –  is suspended there above the cooktop: the perfect place for them, if you think about it.It was the Ermanno Casoli Foundation that, aware of the kitchen in his recently realised architectural work Pescetrullo, had the bright idea of asking the architect Gaetano Pesce to use the experimental fancy of his creativity to interpret an industrial product. It was also a further way for the Foundation, dedicated as it is to the memory of Elica‘s founder, to carry forward Ermanno Casoli’s great aim of encouraging a mutually enriching dialogue between art and industry.
Pescecappa evokes a journey through the intimacy of memory laden with the atmosphere of home – a memory that, translated using a language which looks to the future, through the employment of innovative materials, at the same time conjures up in the imagination all the ingredients that encompass the rich history of foodstuffs, transforming them into a unique object freighted with joy and warmth. It’s a slightly shocking effect, perhaps, for those who associate design with purity of line, restrained beauty and abstract geometry: but being able to read the message that this hood embodies is to take a step towards Pesce’s conception of the industrial product of the future – an object that, defying the serial nature of the production line, allows the consumer to have their own say in the final aesthetic form.Managers, office workers, designers and prototype engineers all gathered together one morning at the end of July in the Elica auditorium to listen to Gaetano Pesce as he talked about the genesis of the Pescecappa hood and its origins in the objects he has created since the 1970s, recounting a career that has made him one of the most significant figures in Italian design and one of the most famous on the international scene.
“Creativity as an end in itself is of no value whatsoever – it only acquires value when it produces something of use.” With this affirmation, Pesce began to describe his career as an architect and designer, his ongoing search for experimental and innovative languages that ventures over a rich variety of disciplines.
It is a professional career marked by objects that for thirty years have indicated a unique style of design. Ranging from architectonic projects to the creation of personal accessories such as jewels, his work searches restlessly for forms and materials that are capable of communicating a sense of concreteness – since, as the artist himself explains: “You cannot communicate through abstraction.”
And the public has been quick to respond to the appeal of this original sense of concreteness. For Pesce, the beauty of an object lies in its uniqueness. In a world of standardisation, the possibility of creating a product that boasts personal features becomes indispensable in terms of affirming a concept of individuality that is often sacrificed.  “The age of industrial production churning out endless, identical copies is finished,” explains Pesce. “We are entering the age of unique pieces, and these can also be obtained using sophisticated serial production processes.”The third industrial revolution, he believes, will be the one that opens up the market to customised objects, as the motor car industry has already partially realised, and the companies that are able to respond quickly to this new logic will certainly enjoy a significant advantage. In the near future, the person will become the fulcrum around which productive activity will revolve, as each individual’s own gloriously imperfect humanity brings aesthetic enrichment to the content of objects which themselves, precisely through such qualities of error and chance, become in turn unique and unrepeatable. In production, the value of difference will return to hold its head high, as opposed to a globalized world where the uniform reigns supreme. Pescecappa’s unique and extraordinary originality can be considered as the most explicit manifesto of this innovative concept.