In 2019, at a New York museum building due renovation, Gaetano Pesce performed a chair. Pesce and a group of collaborators worked among an installation of his Brooklyn studio, transplanted for the first exhibition at Salon 94’s new space, after moving from its long-time set-up at the founder’s home. A series of squishy, long-limbed, balancing, hanging, and flopping pieces were settled around the gallery; with Pesce performing a daily ritual of dripping pigment into a pot, and having colours mixed with spatulas, before pouring them into marbling ponds of resin in up-turned rubber moulds.
In performing his daily chair, Pesce exceeded the dimensionality of paint, and playfully undermined the exactitude of furniture. Working with pigment in 3D — each chair transformed by a shift in gesture — Pesce locked the ‘heat of the moment’ into each piece. As the thick, popping soup solidified, it could go on to be regarded as a piece of art, sat on, climbed up, tucked under, or jumped over. Pesce’s work follows neither the tradition of painting, or of design, and it is all the richer for it. Dismissive of things that appear elegant or nice, of abstraction and restraint, Pesce has sought instead to communicate; to open up the process of making, show how the crude application of paint, the use of supposedly strange materials, or focus on humour over reverence can bring out the beauty in the chaos of our time. ”Colour, not style, is what we need to be stimulated, energised,’’ he once said.
Influenced by his teacher Carlo Scarpa — a Venetian architect and practitioner of organic Modernism, which maintained the mark of the hand — and Arte Povera — a radical art movement popular across Italy in the 1960s and 70s, where artists explored the use of throwaway materials — Pesce fuses high and low, industrial and organic, technical and everyday. His work can feel like a chance encounter, on viewing it, but also in and of the fact that it exists; as if it all came together by accident (which is often true). He paints on tables, doors, and chairs, or makes them out of paint; using heavily-laden sculpting knives and murky colours, escaping the pursuit of beauty or purity of form. Pesce abandons Modernist ideals and materials in favour of polyurethane and resin, the mark of the hand and the weight of the body — he once designed a complex of buildings in the shape of a running child, “following a functional idea is fine…”
Pesce’s Pratt chair was designed as a series with what same shape, but each had a different formula of resin. “The formula of the #1 was jelly — as soon as we opened the mould, the chair collapsed — like a body with no bones”, you can no longer use the chair, only look at it, “as we do with art”. The second chair was stronger, “if you touch it, it collapses”; the third could take the weight of a child, “but it also gives the child a kind of insecurity, because the chair wobbles”; the fourth, fifth and sixth chairs can hold the human form, after that “[they] are so rigid that they become uncomfortable.” Depending on the chemical formula, the chair becomes a sculpture, a piece of design, or more simply remains a chair. Rather than defining his practice, or defining his output, Pesce lets the chemical formula — how things turn out — define each object.
For an exhibition at Collective design fair, New York, in 2013, Pesce had an assistant develop a scent that would fill the room; the air surrounding his furniture, sculptures, architectural designs, and sketches was full of the warm flavours of minestrone, meant to represent his multi-faceted output (and the many flavours required to make a good soup). In an interview about the show, Pesce told a reporter: “If I can try to give a name to the materials of our time, it would be feminine: translucent, soft, warm, colourful, sensual.” Like the ponds of pigment and resin, he defined the material of our time as liquid: “Our historical moment is liquid. We have values that one day go up, down, like the wave of the water.”
In performing his daily chair, Pesce exceeded the dimensionality of paint, and playfully undermined the exactitude of furniture. Working with pigment in 3D — each chair transformed by a shift in gesture — Pesce locked the ‘heat of the moment’ into each piece. As the thick, popping soup solidified, it could go on to be regarded as a piece of art, sat on, climbed up, tucked under, or jumped over. Pesce’s work follows neither the tradition of painting, or of design, and it is all the richer for it. Dismissive of things that appear elegant or nice, of abstraction and restraint, Pesce has sought instead to communicate; to open up the process of making, show how the crude application of paint, the use of supposedly strange materials, or focus on humour over reverence can bring out the beauty in the chaos of our time. ”Colour, not style, is what we need to be stimulated, energised,’’ he once said.
Influenced by his teacher Carlo Scarpa — a Venetian architect and practitioner of organic Modernism, which maintained the mark of the hand — and Arte Povera — a radical art movement popular across Italy in the 1960s and 70s, where artists explored the use of throwaway materials — Pesce fuses high and low, industrial and organic, technical and everyday. His work can feel like a chance encounter, on viewing it, but also in and of the fact that it exists; as if it all came together by accident (which is often true). He paints on tables, doors, and chairs, or makes them out of paint; using heavily-laden sculpting knives and murky colours, escaping the pursuit of beauty or purity of form. Pesce abandons Modernist ideals and materials in favour of polyurethane and resin, the mark of the hand and the weight of the body — he once designed a complex of buildings in the shape of a running child, “following a functional idea is fine…”
Pesce’s Pratt chair was designed as a series with what same shape, but each had a different formula of resin. “The formula of the #1 was jelly — as soon as we opened the mould, the chair collapsed — like a body with no bones”, you can no longer use the chair, only look at it, “as we do with art”. The second chair was stronger, “if you touch it, it collapses”; the third could take the weight of a child, “but it also gives the child a kind of insecurity, because the chair wobbles”; the fourth, fifth and sixth chairs can hold the human form, after that “[they] are so rigid that they become uncomfortable.” Depending on the chemical formula, the chair becomes a sculpture, a piece of design, or more simply remains a chair. Rather than defining his practice, or defining his output, Pesce lets the chemical formula — how things turn out — define each object.
For an exhibition at Collective design fair, New York, in 2013, Pesce had an assistant develop a scent that would fill the room; the air surrounding his furniture, sculptures, architectural designs, and sketches was full of the warm flavours of minestrone, meant to represent his multi-faceted output (and the many flavours required to make a good soup). In an interview about the show, Pesce told a reporter: “If I can try to give a name to the materials of our time, it would be feminine: translucent, soft, warm, colourful, sensual.” Like the ponds of pigment and resin, he defined the material of our time as liquid: “Our historical moment is liquid. We have values that one day go up, down, like the wave of the water.”