Araldica Base Blu
florim > Wall Paint
The miscellany of bright, contrasting, pure colours. The manifest extroversion of decor. The solutions provided to complete the range are in a different tone: reflecting the desire to "stage" a clear contrast with the multicolour ceramic wall coverings, these slabs are in completely neutral shades, in the grey frequencies of concrete.<br /><br />«The collection is intended to create a struggle, a fight. Between something very stiff, which sees itself as governed by clear rules, and a variable, marbled paper, which aims to be completely free.»<br />Federico Pepe "Once upon a time, there was a Roman emperor who lived on a huge splinter in space, a spaceship of multi-coloured marble, where techno music played incessantly. That day he left his spaceship to go to dinner at the Sun King's home, riding his sinuous golden dragon with blood-red eyes."If there were a book with these opening words, Federico Pepe would have designed its cover. And if the book were made into a film, he would definitely be its writer and director. Federico is not an author, director or screenwriter, but this does not prevent him from drawing on his natural ability to create stories through flashes of imagination.Federico Pepe's career started in advertising, a family tradition, which he gradually transformed and built into many other things, in a constant, inevitable investigation of creativity in all its possible forms. He very soon understood that commission work was not enough for him, and he began to explore further afield. The first of these other fields was art, but the consolidated mechanisms on which galleries and gallery owners operate soon became a new limit from which he had to break free: this apparently expanding horizon turned out to be a restrictive cage, more a defining label than an infinite learning opportunity. And definitions are one of the things which least describe Federico: anyone trying to distil his work into two words would find its essence disappearing before their own eyes. He has occupied many roles and engaged in many professions to give shape to his ideas, and in all of them he has excelled, created and led teams, and won awards. Adman, creative director, graphic designer, printer, gallery owner, publisher, curator, performer, painter, designer, director: Pepe does, rather than is, all these.<br /> He works, builds and makes things happen because he is not led by instinct alone and does not succumb to idle whim; he does not rush aimlessly around and does not simply await the inspiration or idea of the century. Quite the opposite. His work comes about and produces results only thanks to strict self-discipline, a design method made up of constant verification, the precise sharing of tasks and roles, the compulsive exploration of unknown contexts, daily physical exercise, the carefully measured use of social media, and occasional spells of isolation in the mountains he loves. It is no coincidence that he created Le Dictateur, a dual-faced entity which may be both his child and his spiritual guide, both friend and boss, part madness and part dictator. Le Dictateur is not Federico's alter ego: it is his superpower. It is not a mask, since in it he actually transforms himself into an artistic project.Le Dictateur is both result and origin of Federico Pepe's work. "I think ideas are born from predisposition," Federico explained to me in 2014. "Not in the sense that "˜we are born predisposed,' but for daily preparation. In this domain I believe that discipline is pivotal. The real talents today are very rigorous people, those who work hard, exchange a lot, think a lot, and know how to apply and balance many different things." An approach which has made him the best-kept secret on the Italian creative scene, a fact well known not only to Pierpaolo Ferrari, Maurizio Cattelan, Nico Vascellari, Jacopo Benassi and Patricia Urquiola, but also to the companies, both large and small, which have turned to him over the years. He has worked and continues to work with them all, designing by laying the foundations of designs naturally expressed in episodes, in a serial pattern which not only gradually builds up Federico's own creative story, but also offers his clients designs so special that they would be virtually impossible without him.<br /> This self-discipline generates heat and energy in such quantities that "“ if it were not imprisoned within the geometrical grids of graphic design "“ it might generate a thermonuclear reaction. The blood running through the veins of his images is black as ink, red as sealing-wax, white as plaster and golden as lava. But there is more, too. His crystal-clear visions are able to break down the slender membrane which separates analogue from digital. He sees matter as absolutely central, but he makes it vibrate with an unusual two-dimensional quality. This can be seen in the way he carves marble with coloured squiggles, recollections of faces briefly sketched as vectors. It is discovered in the skill with which he invades plates and bowls of the finest, monitor-shiny porcelain with geometrical patterns. It becomes tangible in the love with which he brings to life the paper of his publishing projects, peopled with highly elegant, powerfully symmetrical, often kaleidoscopic graphics. It can be admired in the precision with which a metallic factory flooring becomes fabric on an ancient loom, after its resolution is decreased from 300 dpi to 8 bits. It is enjoyed in the hyperbolic repetition of faces and hands in acrylic on canvas in his painting studio, in which every work conserves copy and paste reminders of its predecessor. It amazes in the doors of exquisite metal sideboards, profane glass panels, hand-made but born through the glass of a screen.<br /> A career which has led almost naturally to an encounter with CEDIT, with whom he has created an aesthetically courageous collection, part punk and part aristocratic austerity. The Araldica project's very name evokes strength and nobility, and it is grounded in a past whose weight does not drag it backwards but rather catapults it forwards into the future. Here, Federico's digital geometries become the most solid of materials, taking shape in a graphic object, condensing stories and images into three or two dimensions. In Pepe's and CEDIT's space, Euclidean geometrical forms encounter the marble of Phidias, the intricate patterns of the floor of Milan Cathedral merge into the Baroque images of the marbles found in Roman art galleries, and private space opens out to the infinite space of a thousand possible universal histories.
Cromatica Gradiente bianco-rosa
florim > Wall Paint
A lexicon of colour shades for mixing. A large size and its submultiples. «This work represents a reflection on colour, and above all a proposal on how to transfer the multiplicity of shades typical of a hand-crafted piece into a project produced on a large scale.» Andrea Trimarchi & Simone Farresin Studio Formafantasma base their work in the design world on a strong vocation for research. Simone Farresin and Andrea Trimarchi view every project as an opportunity for study and the acquisition of new knowledge, and their love of speculation establishes a dialectic rapport with the situations offered by each new client. Whether it involves a material, a type or a production method, the first phase of their design process is the mapping of what the specific case places at their disposal. With Cedit, an analysis of the company's past and present was central to the inputs. Inevitably, since "Looking back to look forward" has been the design duo's mission statement for years. In this case, in particular, the company's history was a real treasure trove, a fine blend of memory and technology: on the one hand, the excellence of production technologies now extended with the added potential arising from the engineering of large-sized ceramic tiles, and on the other a wealth of experience build up with great designers of the past, from Zanuso to Noorda, through to <strong>Ettore Sottsass</strong>. Andrea and Simone decided to focus on Sottsass - who started designing for Cedit back in the late Seventies - and made an in-depth study of one of the colour charts he developed towards the end of the Nineties. A spread of colours which gave its name to the "41 Colors" collection, included in the catalogue of the period as a real alphabet for what has proved to be a lasting design language. Colour was much more than just a compulsory step in the dialogue between designer and producer, since Sottsass had already discovered the power of the mystery intrinsic to this universe of invention.<br /><br />With Cedit the master-designer, a long-established lover of ceramics and their crafted unpredictability, found a way of transferring his personal feeling for colour to a wide audience, through industrial mass production. And this assumption is another factor Formafantasma have inherited, interpreting it today with new, even more efficient technical resources just as capable of expressing the secrets of colour. «The concept of colour "in isolation" - Sottsass explained in a 1992 text - classified colour, Pantone, as they call it now, "scientific" colour, is something I still refuse to accept. (...) Colours, the idea of colour, are always intangible, they slip slowly away like words, that run through your fingers, like poetry, which you can never keep hold of, like a good story.» And Formafantasma seem to have chosen that distinction between colour "in isolation" and "intangible" yet ever-present colour as the basis of their work. However, their approach draws on their unique vocation for research and the technical resources of the third millennium. «This work - they explain to us - is a reflection on colour, and above all on <strong>how to bring the multiplicity of shades typical of a hand-crafted piece into a large-scale project</strong>.» The designers look at large, monochrome slabs and turn to the engineers for details of their secrets, their processing stages, the phases in their production. They appreciate that the colour of ceramic material, its ineffable secret, can still be present in the series and large tile sizes in which Cedit leads the way. They understand that this is, in itself, an expressive power which does not need channelling into forms, motifs and signs. But above all, they treat the surface as a large canvas on which they spread pure colour, which tends to be uniform but in fact is never really a "scientific", totally monochrome hue: it is not a Pantone. And this is the source of the fundamental insight, which only children of the transition from the analogue to the digital era could achieve, the reward for those who draw on the past to look to the future.<br /><br />The designers cut the slab into lots of regular pieces, not necessarily of the same size. They restore its identity as a "tile", a familiar name with something ancient about it, but which stands for a module, a unit of measurement, a building block. There is nothing nostalgic about this - on the contrary, the vision is completely new, and the portions of slab created can be reassembled with no restrictions, breaking down the unity of the whole and reviving its essence starting from its structure. As the cards in the pack are shuffled, what emerges is not a figure or motif but the representation of colour itself and its physical nature. It is live matter, born from the meeting of vibrating forces, the mixing of ever-varying percentages of the basic ingredients. And Formafantasma present us with the corpuscular, fragmented essence of these small frames of space and crystallised time, which reveal the code and formula of their composition. So Cromatica is a collection made up of six colours which actually have an infinite number of declinations and compositional possibilities. It is a "discrete" combination in the mathematical sense of the term, capable of generating multiple, variable subsets. At the same time, each slab can be used in its entirety, leaving the impression of analogue continuity unchanged. But what really amazes is the comparison and dialogue between the two approaches: a stroke of genius, laying clear the mysterious appeal the artificial reproduction of colour has always held for mankind. Because, as Sottsass said, «colours are language, a powerful, magical, intangible, flexible, continuous material, in which existence is made manifest, the existence that lives in time and space».
