Personally I admire this designer because of his originality, diversity and variety of pieces he has made throughout his career, and continues to this day performing without stopping.
Pesce is born in a small town in northern Italy, La Spezia in 1939 and he studied architecture at the University of Venice.
He is an admirer of Mies Van der Rohe for his innovation of materials, the expression and use of technology, and of the classic characters such as Caravaggio, Miguel Angel, and Leonardo Da Vinci, for the diversity of their works that evokes in most of their creations human nature.
At the beginning of the 60s he began to emerge as a designer shortly after he made his first exhibition "First study for an elastic architecture" in Helsinki. But what really marked the guidelines of his work were and are, the use of synthetic materials and anthropomorphism; furniture objects based on body parts.
In all his work, he expresses his guiding principle: “that modernism is less a style than a method for interpreting the present and hinting at the future in which individuality is preserved and celebrated.” (Pesce, 2015)
The first design is “Montanara” made in 2009 for the production company Meritalia, with which it has been collaborating since 2002. It is a flexible polyurethane sofa. Upholstered with digitally printed cotton cloth, representing lakes and mountains.
The sofa is transformed completely into an iconic object, which is to express perceptions and sensations; his sofa is engaged in a comical and ingenious game with the metaphor; you sit as if on a waterfall and recline against snow-covered mountains.
According to the readings, I consider it a kitsch design because it satisfy the game pleasure category; the objects can be used for their functions and in a supposedly amusing way, meaning that the happy owner can sit himself down on one mountain lakes and dangle his legs casually in the crashing water, his back firmly supported by a mountain massif, although this landscape has no relationship to a sofa.
Montanara sofa has an ergonomic and organic shape, imitating the forms of nature in a mountain and waterfall by the irregular cuts that make it up.
In this design, Gaetano Pesce uses three main colors: blue, green and white, this colors are linked to nature and provides a sensation of freshness.
Montanara sofa has a high semantic value because the meaning of a sofa is understandable easily.
The second design is “Tavolone”, made in 2007 and produced also by Meritalia is an example of anthropomorphism, which is the attribution of human form or qualities to what is not human. This center table is composed of liquid resin which solidifies following a flexible board which defines the profile of a human face.
This table is asymmetrical and combines both geometrical shapes, as the cubes that hold the table, and organic shapes as the table base in form of a face. Giving a movement sensation because the face is made up of curvilinear lines and the cubes’ holders aren’t arranged in a linear position.
Pesce uses 3 simple colors; red and yellow for the main base and black for the profile and table legs. Red and yellow are two primary colors, that used with resin gives certain transparency when light is reflected. As well, Pesce plays with the contrast of cold and warm, although both colors are categorized as warm colors, when put together yellow is colder than red. The use of warm colors give a cozier sensation to the object, perfect to place in a room. According to the readings, red is associated with love and passion, while yellow stands for the positive virtues of faith, constancy, wisdom and glory.
The design has a sense of balance, starting from the colors where they change in the exact middle of the human face. The cubes that hold the table are balanced as well in size and position, supporting the four edges of the design very well distributed.
This table is considered kitsch because of the game pleasure it poses, because a human face is an amusing way of representing a table which has no relation to its form.
Tavolone has a high semantic value because is not that far from the archetypal table, giving us the meaning of what it is. The syntactic value is high because it can be related to a beautiful aesthetic object, in this case applies “form follows fun”.
Another impressive design is called “senza fine unica” made in 2010 and produced by Meritalia. This armchair is made in polychrome PVC twisted and tangled in a random and unpredictable manner like an intestine.
This piece is full of abstract shapes shaped into a functional form; a place to seat.
The colors used are in contrast of light and dark, this is reached by mixing the red pigment with white or black to vary the scale of brightness.
The sofa has a high semantic value because we understand the meaning of what it based on its common shape, while the syntactic value is low because its aesthetics aren't strong enough; this armchair annul the dogma of classical aesthetics, openly theorizing the “badly done” as a fundamental element of a new canon of beauty that may be able to free itself from every prescriptive rigidity such as symmetry, proportion or regularity to, on the contrary, discover the different, the incomplete, the casual.
This design is considered kitsch because it has an abnormal size in relationship to the function of an armchair and has a redundancy of decorations. Pesce refuses to trace a clear border between beauty and ugliness, vindicating a design method capable of including also the unexpected, the formless, the hybrid and the irregular within the aesthetic sphere. Senza fine unica is an example of a research on forms that is never an end in itself, but that also implies a certain vision of the world, and an attempt to harmonize with the forms the world is taking in this moment in history. (area, 2015)
In conclusion, Gaetano Pesce is a contemporary designer that uses materials of our time in rejection of traditional rigid and heavy ones. He prefers materials whose technical, constructive and formal potentials could hardly be imagined some time ago, for example resin or polychrome.
Pesce’s style is neither much neo-expressionistic or postmodern: we are rather dealing with a “feeling” of the form that is never satisfied with abstract and universal schemes, instead seeking to animate things and architectures, to reveal – through leaps in scale and unexpected short-circuits – the hidden and secret meaning.
Pesce breaks the rigid forms and the pre-established functions of the industrial design and the replaceable ones with soft, feminine forms, almost definitely more tactile, more sensual and more corporal. Impatient with any stable and immutable planning code, he makes an uninterrupted search of experience, emotion and storytelling. (area, 2015)
Area, (2015). Gaetano Pesce, from the web: https://www.area-arch.it/the-noise-of-time/
Pesce, G. (2015). Gaetano Pesce, from the web: http://www.gaetanopesce.com/
Periañez, J. (2011). Gaetano Pesce, from the web: http://www.pepecabrera.com/blog/i/124/66/gaetano-pesce
