The true fictional surrealist

Italian artist Piero Fornasetti remembered in exhibition at the Istituto Italiano di Cultura

Piero Fornasetti was quoted as saying, "design is what the Italians do naturally, spontaneously. It is restraint, harmony, and balance. Not to exaggerate or overdo. To be careful and rigorous."
I wish I could ascribe such virtues to all of my father's side of the family! I'm not quite sure that Leonardo Da Vinci's reproduction of the Last Supper hanging suspiciously in the kitchens of every zia's house counts for "good taste". But anyhow, maybe Fornasetti was making a larger point. He lends credence to his inheritance injecting all participants or fellow-Italians, with a kind of optimism. It stems from the certain knowledge that the artistic traditions long in their evolution in the cathedrals, museums, and ceilings of Italy could mutate into something contemporary - the chair for example, or the simple drinking glass.
This month at the Istituto Italiano di Cultura the works of the late Piero Fornasetti will be on display - a sampling of everything from sculpture, drawing, and even paintings.
Piero Fornasetti spent most of his life in Milan from 1935, when he was only 22, until his death in 1988. Fornasetti became an infamous character within the Italian art scene and relished in the multiple influences his work absorbed. Imagery inspired by architecture, illusionism and magic, and his own personal iconography of obsessive signs - such as the sun, fish, playing cards, and flowers - wove their way down the umbilical cord of creativity and into the mundane, functional, everyday objects which he infused with his own style.
Take, for example, the furniture he developed in tandem with Gio Ponti, a fellow Italian architect and founder of Domus, an Italian magazine. Ponti and Fornasetti collaborated together - Ponti made the objects and Fornasetti decorated them - thus recreating the interiors of all who could afford the expensive duo. Ponti's uniquely delicate chair became wrapped in a newsprint kind of wallpaper, as Fornasetti played origamically with print, revealing the geometric beauty of letters inherent in their shape.
"He makes objects speak", explained Ponti of his life-long collaborator, including hats, waistcoats, pipes, ashtrays, chairs, plates, cabinets, pianos, shops, cars, and even ocean liners.
Fornasetti's brilliance was his ability to insert the surreal into the real and make it seem as though it had always, quite naturally, been there all along. He would take a La Scala programme for example and transfer its text and images to a scarf or a photograph of a girl's ripped lace shirt and make it adorn a dinner plate. It was this tendency towards translating the fantasmagoric that inspired Henry Miller to choose one of his designs for the cover page of his own autobiography and which inspired poet Pablo Neruda to name him "creator of a precious and precise magic".
More than merely a decorator however, Fornasetti was at the same time an artist, illustrator, printer, graphic designer, craftsman, manufacturer and businessman, whose products were sold to an international market. His trademark and obsessively over-reproduced image was a portrait of Lina Cavalieri which he found in a magazine from the 1800s. Of this mysterious love affair with Cavalieri's face, Fornasetti barely explained: "What inspired me to create more than 500 variations on the face of a woman? I don't know. I began to make them and never stopped".
Art critic Ettore Sottsass accounted for Fornasetti's visionary status by saying that - one day when he was young - he must have seen the whole world explode into the air and all of history and all the accumulation of its figures, memories and all the stones, the bodies, the trees, the houses and the monuments "fell onto his paintbrush"; it must have been a bit like in a Michelangelo Antonioni film.
For inspiration in chaos and to drink the lifeblood of a true functional surrealist (if there ever was such a thing), you simply cannot miss this show.
La Follia Pratica: Piero Fornasetti shows at the Istituto Italiano di Cultura, 496 Huron St., from March 10 to April 23. For more information call 416.921.3802.

Publication Date: 2004-03-07
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=3708