Coat rack, Another White Cactus sculpture by Drocco & Mello

Date: 2010
Artist: Drocco & Mello

NEROCACTUS, designed by Drocco & Mello for Gufram, is a coat rack made of polyurethane foam in a black finish.

Produced by Gufram, 2010
Limited edition of 500 copies

Internal steel structure embedded in polyurethane foam

"This cactus is a surreal son of anti-design" Guido Drocco

Guido Drocco is an architect and designer who graduated from the Politecnico di Torino.

Beginning in 1962, he worked with architects Gabetti and Isola. He has received numerous architecture awards and continues his collaboration with Gufram.

Along with Franco Mello, he was part of the Radical Movement of the 1960s, an avant-garde impetus that used pop culture and even kitsch to challenge the canons of modernist good taste. For the young generation of 1960s designers, plastic appeared as a providential material in a society reintroducing fantasy and comfort.

The creations of that era all possess something of the "manifesto-object."

Gufram, the manufacturer since 1968, assembled in 1972 the collection known as "I Multipli," of which the Cactus is a part. It includes unusual pieces that are still produced in limited editions (also present in the world's greatest museums), such as the famous Pratone (the Meadow), giant blades of grass in polyurethane into which one throws oneself rather than sitting, the giant "armchair" pebbles Sedilsasso, or the Bocca sofa, in homage to Dalí's Mae West sofa...

The objects in the "I Multipli" collection were designed to free users from their behavioral habits. Among their influences, land art represented a real source of inspiration for the designers of the 1960s.

This collection is composed of designs manufactured in hardened polyurethane foam with a patented lacquered finish called:

Guflac®

Here, the Cactus is still a desert plant, but it is devoid of thorns and made to human scale... It is, according to its creator, the "surreal son of phytomorphic-inspired anti-design."

Since then, the cacti of Guido Drocco and Franco Mello have been developed by Gufram in numerous different colors and names, such as the white Biancocactus, the black Nerocactus, and the red Rossocactus (all from 2010), and finally the Metacactus, with colors as if scorched by the sun (2012).

The originals are included in the collections of numerous institutions, such as the Museum of Modern Art and Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York, the Centre Georges Pompidou and Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany, and the Tate Modern in London.

The subject of several, free and often ambiguous interpretations, Cactus is the icon of Italian design that has revolutionized the domestic landscape, by subverting the borders between indoor area and open space.

Cactus comes as an ironic totem, and embodies the grit, the imagination and the humour of the design of the Seventies. Likely to draw upon itself everybody’s attention, this hall-tree redeems itself from functionalism at all costs, because it can perform its function, but also be used as a merry decorative element. You have freedom of interpretation. Cactus comes to life in 1972 thanks to the genius of Guido Drocco & Franco Mello, and from the start it questions the static and rigid world of interior design.

Its first edition was a very deep emerald shade (sold out edition), and since then it is cyclically reinterpreted according to the colour and the style of the moment. In 2007 we had the white version (sold out edition); in 2010 it was the turn of red and black.

In 2012, on occasion of the first piece’s fortieth anniversary, Cactus came in a new limited edition called Metacactus. In this variation the green lime colour fades into orange at the tips, as if they were toasted by the scorching sun of the desert.

For Gufram’s comeback to France in 2015, the company introduces a new limited special edition of the legendary Cactus, named Lebluecactus (sold out edition). The hall tree designed by Drocco & Mello turns blue - the same shade as the French flag - a representative hue of all the myriad different nuances that populate the many latitudes of the “Hexagone”.