BETWEEN ART AND TECNO "TWELVE TABLES FOR HOUSES OF ART"

In the exclusive setting of the company's Milan showrooms, strategically located between Corso Garibaldi and Corso Como, Tecno will be exhibiting a series of interpretations of the Vara desk by students of the Brera Academy of Fine Arts under the artistic guidance of Andrea B. Del Guercio, professor of the History of Contemporary Art. The twelve works in question are by Mauro de Carli, Alberto Gianfreda, Federico Unia, Emiliano Rubinacci, Carmine Sabbatella, Giulio Pace, Viola Ceribelli, Debora Fella, Maddalena Lusso, Giuseppe De Siati, Ilaria Forlini and Gium Gong.

As Del Guercio explains, the project derives from a consideration made by the famous art critic Giulio Carlo Argan back in 1992, when he commented on the contribution of contemporary artists to Tecno's design culture: "There are good reasons to believe that today painters and sculptors can make a more radical contribution to the field of design than architects, precisely because their interest is focused primarily on visuality rather than on structure".

Vara is already a product with a unique capacity for personalisation and versatility combined with a striking and unusual visual impact. Designed to emphasise the concept of lightness, Vara is, in Scacchetti's own words, "A top with no apparent means of support, floating in an almost acrobatic equilibrium that hints of the works of Escher: this unique effect is made possible by a highly original support structure that generates a strange kind of amazement by placing space where the eye expects to find a vertical support. The top is divided into a number of sections even at the dished edge, so that object can be transformed in an almost infinite variety of ways."

This principle of "welcoming personalisation" forms the very heart of the Vara concept, and provided the basis for the works of the young artists, who were given complete freedom to modify the design's tops and courtesy panels. Delighted by the results, Scacchetti commented that "Each proposal completes and enriches Vara without contradicting its concept, architecture and composition. Vara maintains its striking identity even in the face of the most radical proposals, in a fascinating dialogue between theme and variation".

In the project supervised by professor Del Guercio, the Vara table-desk has been revisited in three different interpretative approaches: decoration, creativity within functionality, and transformation, in a progression of ever more radical modifications ranging from simple colour changes to complete transformation of the object.

Del Guercio's guidance has turned a serial product into a series of unique works. Each prototype in this micro-collection is also complemented by a work of the artist responsible for it, in a continuous dialogue with the other great Tecno classics that populate the space of the showroom.

Opening hours Fuorisalone:
8/13 Aprile 10:00 - 20:00