Design for the senses
The design of life is that of the senses, where the object involves scent, hearing, sight, and touch. It is a process which expands human experience and places the body at the center of one’s own thoughts and actions. It is a method which starts from Pesce’s own feelings, and that since 1960 has led him to conceive and create fluid and mobile objects.
Expressing movement and sensuality, such objects have affirmed themselves as examples of “participatory” architecture, where the user or the viewer, the producer or the craftsman become active and vigorous participants. Pesce’s armchairs and vases, lamps and chairs, cabinets and tables, as well as his architectural work in Japan and Brazil, are made of soft and pliable materials such as polyurethane, felt, latex and rags.
They recall human profiles as well as urban, natural and marine settings, love and eroticism, Christian and Islamic icons. Pesce’s creations express the desire for a space which is lived-in and sensuous, as well as expressive and figurative. Here, his imagination and exaltation of new materials and new technologies play a crucial role in a new awareness of the present and the future.
Pesce’s fluent design methodology results in colorful and soft “things” made of cloth and silico- ne, which become a womb bursting with figurative and organic objects. They are unique and indefinite, capable of challenging impersonal industrial standardiza- tion. Pesce’s creations vibrate with smells and sounds in such a way that they seduce and stun with their overlapping layers of meanings and symbols, memories and events.
The result is a cave where stalactites and stalagmites are vases that move and bend; chairs that flex and fold; fragrant buildings that emit light through their walls; misshapen and imperfect objects whose uniqueness is enhanced by their aggressive and violent colors. It is a magma of life and sensuality which overwhelms impersonal and abstract design.
Gaetano Pesce’s exhibition is currently on view at the Italian Cultural Institute (until August 31, 2010.) 1023 Hilgard Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90024. Tel. 310-443-3250 www.iiclosangeles.esteri.it
by Germano Celant
