By We all know what design is, since it originated half a century ago, entering the cultural scene as a means to embellish industrial products. Later on, in the 1900s, it became a synonym for innovative projects, used to create objects that could be functional, practical and highlight the properties of materials. Actually, design was the younger brother of what architecture defined the International Style, which received contributions from architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and Alvar Aalto. This artistic expression that today we call Minimalism became a way of doing things that is perpetrated and employed in construction as well as object manufacturing. Personally, I have always been persuaded that it would be possible to evolve from this movement and consider design as a comment on reality, able to express political, religious, philosophical and existential values. Overall, it is worth noting that, in the past, art had always been a set of products, including portraits, landscapes, religious images, which accomplished the requests of various clients, such as reproducing the likeness of a beloved or desired person. If this object was modeled by an artist, then its functionality was enriched with a more profound aspect, a cultural quality. At the same time, coming back to our time, if design is created by someone who knows how to fill in the cultural dimension, it then becomes a veritable artistic expression. Finally, I would like to clarify something: categories in art are obsolete. In my opinion, specificity in poetry, sculpture and painting no longer exists. Our era is, indeed, multifunctional and this characteristic is due to the great deal of communication, which leads our conscience to investigate ever different fields.
Bio: Gaetano Pesce was born in 1939, in La Spezia. After living in Venice, London, Helsinki and Paris, he moved to New York in 1980, where he still resides. His multidisciplinary designs have been included, among others, in the permanent collections of MoMa and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
