Policroma Lichene
florim > Wall Paint
Recurring geometries, combinations of figures. Marble and marmorino plaster: comparison and dialogue. The collection is completed by a linear listello tile with the motif of a sequence of vertical rectangular blocks, which can be combined with the slabs to further enrich compositions involving continuous ceramic surfaces cladding.<br /><br />"Another reference is the use of Italian marbles on the verge of extinction, rare marbles such as Rosa Valtoce, the marble used in Milan Cathedral."<br />Cristina Celestino Cristina Celestino's smartphone contains a folder of images entitled "Milan". Photographs that are more like notes. Photographs of architectural features, materials or details of shapes encountered by chance during a walk, but they cannot be described as merely a vague "source of inspiration". This filing system, created in response to a fleeting instinct, is an integral part of the method of work adopted by the architect and designer, who starts off without preconceptions "“ or "free", as she puts it before drawing inputs from a vast world of references, from Hermès scarves to the works of the great Masters (in the specific case of Policroma). This accumulation, partly spontaneous and party the outcome of in-depth historical knowledge and study, naturally activates a process of synthesis and personal interpretation common to all Cristina Celestino's output.<br /><br /><br />The wall covering collection designed for Cedit was no exception, although in this case the designer was dealing with a project with variable dimensions, reaching up even to the architectural scale. In her own distinctive way, she combined a variety of references. Adolf Loos's passion for coloured types of marble, and Cipollino in particular. Carlo Scarpa's angular metal frames and Marmorino plaster in Venice. The French fashion house's square silk scarves. The entrance halls of Milan palazzos, Gio Ponti, the city's Cathedral. All expressed in the designer's own language: well balanced geometrical forms, subtle colours (shades similar to those of Scarpa himself), an effortless, almost restrained, playful elegance. The mood is that of the homes of the enlightened bourgeoisie who shaped the history of Milan, Celestino's adoptive city and an endless source of inputs. She has worked its interiors, including some of the least expected a 1928 tram, the historic Cucchi confectionery store hybridising her own style with the existing context. An imitative effect which is also the key to the meaning of the new Policroma collection: the marble varieties replicated using the Cedit technology are all from Italian quarries that are virtually "worked out". This revives an increasingly rare material as a "living" presence, in a different form which makes no claim to replace the natural original. Quite the contrary, Celestino immediately states her intention to imitate, by combining marble and Marmorino plaster in some variants with a contrasting frame (a typical feature for her, just as it was for Scarpa), and evoking the centuries-old marble-imitating scagliola plasterwork with a contemporary formula.<br /><br /><br />The types of marble chosen are central to the project's character. Verde Alpi, a favourite with Gio Ponti and often found in Milan entrance halls, features tightly packed patterning. Breccia Capraia, still found in a very few places in Tuscany, has a white background with just a few veins. Cipollino, in the special Ondulato variety in green and red, is patterned with spirals. Rosa Valtoce, on the other hand, was used by the "Veneranda Fabbrica" guild to build Milan Cathedral. It is an iconic stone with dramatic stripes, popular in the past; it is now sourced from one very small quarry in Piedmont which has been virtually abandoned.<br /> The many different elements that make up the Policroma collection all reflect the importance of craftsmanship to Cristina Celestino's design style: the modules can be freely mixed and combined, for example to create a concave or convex semicircle, or for the large-scale replication of small features initially conceived as trims, functional details transformed into a dominant motif.There is a return to the theme of the interior, a large or small protected space, conceived as suspended in space and time yet also reassuring and protective. It is designed through its coverings in a stark yet not minimalist way, with intelligence and with no overreaching artistic ambitions. An understated space and an extremely stylish declaration. In Milan style, of course.
Chimera Colore Bianco
florim > Wall Paint
In <em>Chimera,</em> Elena Salmistraro merges rigour with self-expression, in a graphic grammar laden with symbolic meaning. <em>Empatia </em>speaks to the emotions with graphics that interpret, through a highly individual abstract code, the stage make-up of a clown, with the aid of superimposed geometric forms and images. <em>Radici </em>is a tribal statement, a tribute to primitive ritual custom, evoked by the interplay between a sequence of triangles and rectangles and a set of figurative fragments. <em>Ritmo</em> is inspired by fabrics, suggesting the rhythmic alternation of woven yarns through a largely linear pattern. In <em>Colore, </em>the upheaval of a background of small isolated spots generated by a parametric digital program is combined with densely packed repeated forms. "The Chimera collection is rather like a book with four different chapters: I set out to differentiate these graphic motifs to create four totally different stories."<br></br>Elena Salmistraro It all starts with drawing. A <em>passion</em> for drawing. An <em>obsession</em> with drawing. Drawings like spider-webs, obsessively filling spaces, in a kind of manual choreography or gymnastics, a continuous flow. Elena Salmistraro draws all the time. She draws everywhere. Mostly on loose sheets or random surfaces. First and foremost with pen and pencil. Her drawings only acquire colour at a later stage. Often - just like Alessandro Mendini used to do - she draws "monsters": fascinating yet disturbing, subversive forms. The denser, more contorted the shape, the more obvious its underlying truth. For Elena, drawing is an intimate act. It is relaxing. And therapeutic. With an unrivalled communicative strength. Because drawing gives shape to ideas: you both give form to the world and reveal yourself. This passion, combined with natural graphic talent, has guided Elena Salmistraro in her project for Cedit: an experimental series of ceramic slabs produced using a high-definition 3D decorative technique. The explicit aim is to transform surfaces beyond their original flatness so that a new, visual and tactile, three-dimensional personality emerges, sweeping aside the coldness and uniformity that ceramic objects often inevitably convey.Elena Salmistraro has always viewed ceramics as a democratic material, in view of their accessibility, and the infinite potentials for shaping matter that they provide. She began working and experimenting with ceramics very early in her career, just after she graduated from the Milan Politecnico in 2008. She came into contact with small artistic craft firms specialising in smallproduction lots, and cut her teeth on projects that demanded the hand-processing of every detail, and finishes of high artistic value, for the high end of the market. The large corporations and galleries came later, but here again Elena kept faith with her desire to make mass-produced pieces unique, and to combine artistic value with specifically industrial characteristics. The monkey-shaped <em>Primates</em> vases reflect this method and intention, aiming to excite, surprise and charm. Antiminimalist and hyper-figurative, playful, ironic and a rich image-maker, often drawing on anthropology and magic, over the years Salmistraro has built up her own fantastic universe, inhabited by ceramic bestiaries, painted jungles and a cabinet like a one-eyed cyclops , always finding inspiration and inputs in nature and always aiming to reveal the extraordinary in the everyday. Given this background, it was almost inevitable she would work with Cedit: constantly seeking new talents and new approaches, as well as designs that break down the boundaries of ceramics and release them into the realm of art and innovation, the Modena company has recognised Elena Salmistraro as a leading contemporary creative spirit and involved her in a project intended to experiment with fresh ideas in materials and synaesthetics.Salmistraro's collection for Cedit is entitled <em>Chimera</em> and consists of large ceramic slabs, which can be enjoyed not only visually, through their patterns and colours, but also on a tactile level. Like the chimera in the "grotesque" tradition, monstrous in the etymological sense of the word with its merging of hybrid animal and vegetable shapes, the Cedit project attempts to originate a synaesthetic form of ceramics, through a three-dimensional development that exactly reproduces the texture of leathers and fabrics, creating an absolutely new kind of layered effect, with a tactile awareness that recalls the passion of grand master Ettore Sottsass for "surfaces that talk". And the surfaces of the slabs Salmistraro has created really seem to talk: in <em>Empatia </em>clown faces add theatricality to the cold gleam of marbles, interspersed with references to Art Déco graphics; <em>Radici</em> uses the textures of leathers and hide as if to re-establish a link between ceramics and other materials at the origins of human activity and creativity; in <em>Ritmo</em> the texture of cloth dialogues with pottery, almost in homage to the tactile rationalism of warp and weft, of which Bauhaus pioneer Anni Albers was one of the most expressive past interpreters ; finally, <em>Colore</em> has a spotted base generated by computer to underline the contrast between analogue and digital, the graphic sign and the matter into which it is impressed. It is an aesthetic of superimposition and mixing, and especially of synaesthesia: as in her drawings, in the <em>Chimera </em>slabs Elena Salmistraro's art is one of movement and acceleration. A process not of representation but of exploration. Of the world and of oneself. Almost a kind of Zen, for distancing oneself from the world to understand it more fully. In every sense.
