Bad boys expose creative underbelly

Renowned Italian designs not always minimalist, rational

Much of modern Italian design is characterized by what many would call good taste. The works of designers such as Castiglioni, Lissoni, Magistretti and Meda are invariably described as clean, graceful, minimalist, rational and refined. But there has also been a concurrent stream in Italian design which has celebrated forms which are more overtly sensual, colourful and sometimes even downright messy. Their practitioners we can perhaps call Italy's "bad boys" of design.
In the mid-20th century, Torino-based architect and designer Carlo Mollino for the most part rejected the prevailing rules of modernism and instead infused much of his work with a sensibility inspired by the early 20th century Art Nouveau movement. One of his best-known designs is the Arabesco table, a sensually shaped combination of glass and plywood which resembles a speedy land animal caught in mid-stride. Speed was a particular obsession for the Italian designer, who filled his leisure time with skiing, race car driving and flying planes. The bon vivant Mollino, whose variety of interests also included erotic photography and ancient Egyptian culture, described his work as "streamlined surreal." His portfolio has had staying power - Mollino's unique furniture has sold for millions at auction and a career retrospective is currently showing at a Torino museum.
Emerging Milan designer Fabio Novembre seems to have inherited some of Mollino's approach to work and life. British design magazine Icon calls the interior designer's work "narcissistic neo-baroque" and Novembre says that sensuality and sexuality inform much of his work - he jokes that a brothel might be his ideal design project. His best-known work thus far is his interior for a new Florence luxury hotel. Novembre's material palette included leather, lamè, and mosaic tile and the hotel's bedrooms have been described as "pimp-chic."
Italian design legend Ettore Sottsass Jr. began his career conventionally enough in the 1950s, when he designed typewriters and early computers for business machine giant Olivetti. But even back then, Sottsass, son of one of Italy's most prominent rationalist architects of the 1920s and 30s, hinted in work such as the Valentine typewriter that his design instincts would follow the sensual and eventually post-modern. Sottsass' rejection of clean-lined modernism came to a head in the early 1980s, when he assembled a group of talented young architects and founded the now-famous Memphis design movement (see Urban Mode). Memphis injected colour and knowing 1950s-style kitsch into the decade's design vocabulary. Though the group designed a lot of furniture, it was their exploration of garish graphics that had the greatest effect on everyday consumer culture. Rather than creating timeless design - the overriding modernist goal - Sottsass insisted Memphis was about design that could be discarded. When minimalism again took hold in the 1990s, the Memphis impulses were indeed soon forgotten.
In the late 1960s, upstart designer Gaetano Pesce drew raves for his sensual Up chair and ottoman, seating which seemed to define an era of all things groovy. But the popular chair has proved to be the commercial exception in Pesce's long career, which has emphasized an exploration of the boundary between art and design. He has railed against dry modern design and responded with playful work such as a chair made of discarded rags, a lamp shaped like a plate of spaghetti and a Manhattan sunset immortalized in the form of a sofa. Pesce's Nobody's Perfect series of designs celebrates the potential for uniqueness within mass production, but some critics have only seen ugly. The veteran designer's reply? "When you say my work is ugly, yes, because in the human being there is beauty and ugliness, and large and small, but what is really beautiful is what is different."
Despite the cultural pull of neat and tidy modernism, designers such as Mollino, Novembre, Pesce, and Sottsass have dared to be different and reminded us of the classic conflict in the human spirit between rational Apollo and wild Dionysus.

Publication Date: 2006-11-12
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=6759