DEPARTURES STYLE VISUAL
DEPARTURES STYLE VISUAL STIMULATION 34 Pop Goes More than 50 years into his career, the radical nonno of Italian design is still using colour to defy convention. by Karin Nelson. Photographs by Stefan Ruiz Above: designer Gaetano Pesce in his Brooklyn studio with his Up chair for B&B Italia; right: Pesce recently reproduced his 1984 Pratt Chair in new colours for the gallery Salon 94 Design, salon94design.com the Easel WHEN GAETANO PESCE was nine, he punched his teacher for being stupid. Improper as the act was, it was also fortuitous. He was expelled and then enrolled in the only other school in Padua, Italy, an all-girls institution. “I was the only boy, and I learnt a lot about how to think and act,” says the architect and designer. Two decades later, in 1969, he produced his now iconic Up chair for B&B Italia, a bulbous seat shaped like an ancient fertility goddess. With its spherical ottoman attached like a ball and chain, the chair symbolised the oppression of women by men. It was the first industrial-design object to express such a political point of view – and 50 years on, it’s as relevant as ever. But then Pesce, who turns 80 in November, has always been a designer for our times. His work, which runs the gamut from bouncy resin vases to an office building covered with flowerpots, is fluid, imperfect, wildly innovative and, most markedly, colourful. “Colour is vital. When I CHAIR: COURTESY GAETANO PESCE/SALON 94 DESIGN
LAMP: COURTESY GAETANO PESCE/SALON 94 DESIGN Pesce’s one-of-a-kind 2018 Medusa table (right) and 2016 resin-and-steel Rug lamp (above) for Salon 94 Design started using it, my colleagues were dressed like priests, which I never understood,” says Pesce, referring to a time when both the culture and aesthetics of design took their lead more from staid architecture than from art. Even when his pieces are laden with social commentary, they are joyful. Which is why, along with Kaws, Jeffrey Deitch and Laure Heriard Dubreuil, who installed a cabinet he designed – shaped like a smiley face and painted candyfloss pink – in her New York fashion boutique The Webster, his biggest fans are children. “Art is not drama,” says Pesce, seated in his bendy 357 Feltri chair for Cassina, which Raf Simons reupholstered with American quilts for last year’s Design Miami. “Art is life, and in a moment when our world is a little depressing, it’s important to make something positive and pleasurable.” To celebrate the Up chair’s anniversary, Pesce staged an 8m version of it in Milan’s Piazza del Duomo this April as part of the city’s Design Week. And earlier this year, he presented new and old works at Galerie Nathalie Obadia in Brussels. Pesce, who’s been based in New York since 1980, still goes to his Brooklyn studio every day. He’s busy creating new pieces and playing around with innovative materials, such as a translucent resin he recently used to recast his 1984 Pratt chairs, making them even more vivid. In the autumn, he’ll show new work at the Manhattan gallery Salon 94 Design, and, as part of the city’s Performa 19 Biennial, he will present a resin rug, pieces of which viewers can carve out and take home. “Art is done for others to enjoy.” Right: Pesce in his studio working on La Perdita della Manualità (The Loss of Dexterity), a deflated hand sculpture about the decline of handwork 35 DEPARTURES
