Volume (2)009 Nilufar Catalogue Volume (2)009 + monograph Piccolo Volume II Martino Gamper + Table Landscape by Martino Gamper + Tronchi by Andrea Salvetti + Leather Collection by Maarten De Ceulaer + Progetto non finito by Britt Moran and Emiliano Salci + Platform B and The disappearance of Objects by Karen Chekerdjian On April 20, 2009 – two days before Salone Internazionale del Mobile in Milan - Galleria Nilufar will open the exhibition it usually proposes in this period of the year. The vernissage in Via della Spiga 32 will be held from 5 to 11 p.m. The exhibition will be opened for the whole month of May, from Tuesday to Saturday and from 10 a.m. to 7.30 p.m.; on Mondays from 3 to 7.30 p.m. The exhibition is a way to know the recent development of contemporary artists-designers working for the Gallery, as well as discovering the new “seeds” of international design, new artists making their debut in Italy. Following tradition, it coincides with the issue of Nilufar yearly catalogue, edited by Nina Yashar. Once again the interest is focused on Martino Gamper, a strong character on contemporary design stage. He proposes a further development of the work Gio Ponti translated by Martino Gamper, reinterpreting Gio Ponti’s furniture for the Sorrento-located Parco dei Principi hotel (1960). The whole room on the ground floor houses the tables of Table Landscape, an installation made of tables composed by other tables, deriving from the deep dialogue with Ponti’s tangible and intangible heritage. This occasion will witness also the presentation of Piccolo Volume II Martino Gamper, a collection of Gamper’s designs being enclosed with Nilufar catalogue as well as a sequel of the 100 Chairs in 100 Days and 100 Ways book. It is the first book proposing a synthesis of the works by the artist-designer coming from South Tyrol. Starting from its double format, the book seduces out of surprise and conquers even the most disenchanted eyes with the strength of essentiality. Gamper proposes some sort of ars combinatoria, amusing itself in repeating the same things without end, with a joy hardly held and the certainty to have always the last word: “You see, I was able to surprise you once more…” Gamper’s work is enlightened by freedom and listening, a going-to-and-fro between aesthetic and social, poetic and useful, without forgetting even the humblest details. His idea of revisited isn’t born from the attention towards sustainability (sometimes his production involves also pallet woods and packaging cases with stamps), but from a wider scope of how things are reincarnated in other things, as well as of how things are more linked together than we are bound to think. It is interesting to point out that many of the texts commenting images come from press releases: Gamper’s world is transversal, ironic, ceaseless, without any fear to write down rules. Andrea Salvetti exhibits Tronchi, furniture-sculpture composed of cubes and parallelepipeds balancing one on the other. They are cast in aluminium, the material reproducing bark wrinkled skin and inner rings. Putting nature into a metal dimension is just like stopping the time passing, like swimming against the stream. But it is also in the same time a reciprocity essay: nature is manipulated to create objects consecrating its original aura. The reproduction of biomorphic and anthropomorphic shapes isn’t a novelty for Salvetti. Tronchi sees however also a new element: the play, the personalisation of schemes melting and dividing according to circumstances, places and people. “My trunks are first of all a play… Totem of nothing, and of all.” The same bent towards game and recreation is perceivable also in the wardrobe, the desk and the container-piece of furniture belonging to the Leather Collection by Maarten De Ceulaer (Nilufar edition). Towers and asymmetric compositions are made of suitcases in precious leathers created by Ralph Baggaley, one of the best-renowned artisans in Brussels. Small cathedrals, built on behalf of the idea of the capability to be worn, evoking sophisticated atmospheres and created for the houses of aristocratic nomads going through geographies and histories even though they stay at home. “Stories are told, emotions are aroused.” Britt Moran and Emiliano Salci exhibit a series of large chandeliers belonging to the Progetto non finito, Nilufar edition. They are composed of concentric rings placed one on the other and having different sizes, colours (black, different hues of grey, ivory and dark red), as well as materials (brass, silver and painted metal.) The effect is a sliced space, keeping however the “slices” linked together. Rings support the whole led-lighting system producing thin cuts of light. The space floats inside and outside the object. Together with the mysterious polygonal “quartz” belonging to the collection The Disappearance of Objects, Karen Chekerdjian brings via della Spiga Platform B, a large and low table made of brushed brass inspired by a rocky landscape. The goal is a townscape, where geometric blocks are well-balanced and fitted one into the other. The designer living between Beirut and Amman writes: “When I saw it in the smith workshop I had the sensation of having built the bridge of a submarine or a warship… Once again I had been able to use in my work the war aesthetics, terrible and extremely seducing…”

Franco Albini and Franca Helg: on behalf of an authentic design Dealing with Albini&Helg design work means digging into the roots of the thought of Italian twentieth-century material culture and going back to the ideas of “moral” and “value” referred to the job of architect and/or designer, being little traceable according to me. Authenticity and intellectual honesty are demonstrated in the rigorous method of transmission of knowledge and following a “reasonable” road without accepting fleeting fashions. In this process we can recognise the usual procedure as a cultural matrix on which the designing method of both Masters is based, the method of a high-level craftsman workshop recalling the work of artists in the past. Albini was already a well-known architect when Franca Helg started working with him, in 1951, in the studio located in via Panizza, Milan: the young Helg immediately took the responsibility to meet the studio engagements, thus stimulating dialogue and openings towards new project ways, while always following the Master’s path. Two minds and two generations placed one in front of the other, following the maieutic approach on the drawing table as well as with co-operators and builders. A constant element often coming back through products is the clear and declared drawing of structural parts bearing a strong analogy with the architectural projects: the trestle crossing can carry a chair or a table, being morphologically solved following the fixed goals. The design pieces, being then acknowledged as true icons of the twentieth century, are in nuce just in this period. “Margherita” and “Gala” – both manufactured by Bonacina using cane, an ancient material for an ante-litteram design. The “Luisa” armchair, being submitted to the Poggi brothers, in Pavia, in 1949. It would take six years of continuous refining to reach the designers’ convincing definition: the engagement was awarded with the Compasso d’Oro in 1955. The moment sees also the beginning of a unique relation between the Albini&Helg studio and the Poggis, a relation which saw numerous products bearing a flawless and yet serial manufacturing level leave the small company located in Pavia. From the “Luisa” to the “Tre Pezzi” armchair the work is constant and meets several typologies. The period saw the production of the “trestle” table and the “Cicognino” small table, of the “LB7” bookshelf and the “Stadera” desk. Sometimes the Poggis were defined cabinet-makers, but this definition is clearly reductive, as the “Tre Pezzi” armchair witnesses; designed with a wooden frame by the designers, it was shown as a prototype at the XI Triennale in Milan, then reinvented with a metal frame carrying its upholstered parts, according to an unmistakable design anticipating many products, as well as mediocre imitators to be seen again in the following years. The effort is the same also in the “Fiorenza” armchair for Arflex: many are the attempts to create the bergère with a contemporary style, where the trestle wooden frame is emphasised while carrying the upholstered parts; an effort of the material not to be underestimated in the X-crossing connection element, getting the Poggis to propose their version – called PL44 – being the direct result of the prototype shown at VII Triennale in Milan in 1940. On the occasion of that same Triennale, Albini designed an essential swing chair-deckchair made of two curved pipes and a net to receive the person, thus reducing to the core structure the chaise longue of Le Corbusier remembrances, from which the wood prototype then redesigned with the Poggis derives: the result is the PS16 swing chair. “Detail isn’t a detail”, according to Albini&Helg, studying their architectures from the overall plant to furniture, interior design objects, lamps, as witnessed by the first pieces for Arteluce. They recall some solutions accomplished for the Palazzo Rosso museum in Genoa, from which a whole collection of wall, ceiling and floor lamps derives. The same principle is true also for Sirrah, the lamp manufacturer established in the mid Seventies, when it made its debut with the AM/AS series, a system allowing many different shapes. Here the Albini&Helg hand is easy to notice in the joint between the differently shaped frames and the lighting part, in elegant Salviati glass. by Daniele Mariconti