Interior Design
Art dresses spaces.
With the "Design Your Slabs" technology, ceramic surfaces become blank canvases ready to be customised
Francesco Simeti’s art meets the Iris Ceramica Group Design Your Slabstechnology, to create “Questa stanza non ha più pareti”, the bespoke, site-specific worked for the new Milan headquarters of Fondazione Officine Saffi.
A perfect, crystalised natural landscape, suspended in time, crosses human history going beyond geographical and cultural boundaries. “Questa stanza non ha più pareti” ("This room no longer has walls"), the site-specific art work designed by Francesco Simeti for the bar area of the new headquarters of Fondazione Officine Saffi (in via Niccolini 35A, Milan) borrows a famous line from a classic Italian song to express a double metaphor. The large ceramic slabs adorned with the work of Francesco Simeti using the “Design Your Slabs” printing technology customise the space, laid continuously with millimetric precision. A true transposition of historical ceramic elements from different eras and places around the world.
The ceramic process is really interesting, as it brings variables that often cannot be controlled, yet always create magical results. Ceramics have a practically infinite variety of finishes….and many souls,”
Francesco Simeti explains
Animals and plants, set in their habitats on land and at sea, create a world that is both poetic and concrete at the same time. The elements were taken from the iconographic history of ceramic decorations from the Etruscan age to modern times, found on vases, plates, terracotta and ancient ceramic surfaces from Turkey, Greece and Italy. The project took over 6 months of historical and geographical research, and was a real challenge for the Sicilian artist, who lives in New York, who was able to produce a collage with a perfect balance of solids and voids, harmonising the blank spaces with the decorations.
Nature has always been an inspiration for Francesco Simeti, who in many of his works sets off the natural environment against the artificial human world. Here it is represented by land, sea and sky as in a perfect world in total harmony, while humans are not portrayed even though their presence can be felt. Human presence is real, as people inhabit the space in the room, this time taking part as a subject in the natural environment drawn around them.
“This space is a kind of history of ceramics. All the decorations come from historical vases, plates and objects from different eras, cultures and places. The ceramic material and the technology even allowed me to maintain the defects in the original images,” Simeti continues
The ceramic slabs printed by Iris Ceramica Group using its “Design Your Slabs” technology faithfully reproduced all the subjects in the collage, including their “defects” – which are not really defects at all – such as the cracked glazes, tiny missing details (in archaeology, some findings are damaged by the passing of time), the signs of the joints in the original laid surfaces, the rounded shapes of decorated plates. The colours are both shaded and solid, while the more graceful subjects, birds and butterflies – chosen involuntarily or perhaps unconsciously - are even reproduced in shiny gold.
And the project doesn't end here, but will evolve in the third dimension. Included in the events planned at Fondazione Officine Saffi, Simeti will curate a series of workshops open to different groups and communities, getting back to what he likes doing best with ceramics - “getting his hands dirty”: new solid and fluid elements inspired by nature will thus become architectural elements that will complete the site-specific work over time.
Informazioni di contatto
Maria Grazia Pacchioni
mpacchioni@icgmail.com