Gaetano Pesce
Gaetano Pesce is a major figure in Italian and world design of the 1950s. His work is as polymorphous as it is rich.
He is indeed called an architect, designer, painter, sculptor, stylist, scenographer, professor and contemporary philosopher.
Gaetano Pesce travels through history through strong, innovative, colorful pieces. His creations are intended to be both functional and garish, filled with humor or sometimes even shocking.
His works as an architect demonstrate his taste for innovation through the use of atypical materials and colors. He frequently uses resin, recycled paper or plastic. The Pink Pavilion, an entirely pink building constructed from rigid polyurethane, insulating against heat and cold, has excluded the usual construction materials. His best-known architectural work is the Organic building in 1993 in Osaka, Japan: a sort of prefabricated “pocket” containing earth and anchored into the wall, creating a vertical garden. With this concept, Pesce wanted a living building, changing color with the seasons.
Among his works of design, always committed and radical, we note the UP5 Donna armchair: a sculptural foam armchair representing a woman's body chained to a ball, the Golgotha chair alluding to the shroud of Christ, then its chador lamp symbol of the Islamic veil .
The objects he creates must go beyond their status as useful objects, they must create surprise. Through his work, Gaetano Pesce invented the unique example created within a series of similar products, because they were made with the same mold. The Italian master rightly describes this process as a “diversified or
“pluralist”.
We could criticize it for an unfinished or imperfect design, but this is precisely what Pesce is looking for: manufacturing defects become the mark of a search for authenticity, in reaction to standardization.
he knew how to create unique, colorful pieces, as if filled with vitality.
He opposes the standardization of our consumer society to reveal the authenticity of its objects. For him, it is only through originality that an object can convey emotions.
His work is recognized throughout the world and is permanently exhibited at the MoMA in New York, the Center Pompidou, the Louvre, and in other museums in London, Germany and San Francisco.
