{"id":16331,"date":"2014-09-21T23:15:31","date_gmt":"2014-09-21T21:15:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.area-arch.it\/the-pesce-mode-2\/"},"modified":"2015-10-07T11:46:02","modified_gmt":"2015-10-07T09:46:02","slug":"the-pesce-mode","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.area-arch.it\/en\/the-pesce-mode\/","title":{"rendered":"The Pesce mode"},"content":{"rendered":"

Senza Fine Unica,\u00a0 Meritalia, 2010<\/em><\/p>\n

At an exhibition of work by Carlo Scarpa years ago I was especially taken by the margins of his working drawings. These were covered with doodles, frequently of female bodies, and by periodic blots that turned out to be wine stains. The marks were not simply of the fecundity of his imagination but of his immersion in both the body and the bodily.
\nThis preoccupation revealed itself both concretely and abstractly: Scarpa was a master of humane proportion, a designer who was fascinated with the mechanics of the human interaction with architecture, the opening of doors, the useful and dramatic modulation of light, the final interment in the earth.
\nScarpa\u2019s work is intensely refined in a traditional way, in the precision of its details, in the austerity and harmony of its materials, in its abidingly elegant sense of composition. The work of Gaetano Pesce is also incredibly refined but the system that describes this refinement is quite different, akin to the refinement of the human digestive tract, expressed both in the elegant necessity and concision of its operation and in its fascinating, convoluted, and pliant morphologies. Modernism, in its high functionalist days, was also preoccupied with the guts of architecture but Pesce\u2019s fascination is something else. From the get-go, many modernists used the visuality of building systems \u2013 their pipes and ducts and fans and wiring chases and webbed joists and bolted joints \u2013 as an expressive element in their designs. The argument was both from a kind of integrity \u2013 an idea about \u201chonesty\u201d \u2013 and from a fascination with the raging technology that marked so many aspects of the historic moment. It was, however, extremely reductive and ruled by a sense of parsimony that was eventually its undoing. Modernism died on the shoals of minimalism and the emptiness of its social promises. Pesce walks another line between technology and representation. His favorite materials, especially resin, embody the truth of their own transformation, a kind of lingering viscosity and gooey-ness. The Senza Fine series is particularly replete with characteristic Pescean moves and with the idea of systems that stay soft, do not harden into mechanistic durability. Here, the collusion of tubular resin elements somehow concatenates spaghetti and intestine and \u2013 as Pesce\u2019s sketch of a bird contemplating the chair suggests \u2013 worm. There\u2019s a wry relationship between the image of the digested and digestion, that surely evokes Yeats\u2019 observation that, in craft, the dancer and the dance lock into a oneness but a oneness which retains a sense of origins, the raw visibly embedded in the cooked.\u00a0The rampant biomorphism of Pesce\u2019s work is also seen in the openings that appear in the backs of the chairs might be either eye(s) or anus and in their larger form, which, as with others in Pesce\u2019s oeuvre, suggests a seated person, a cloth draped over his or her lap, a lap in which another person will comfortably sit. Although Pesce is a product engineer not a genetic one, his process shadows ontogeny and its embodied riff on the nature of art always foregrounds the idea of gestation. One has the sense that his phylogeny is less built than cured, emerging from some mental blastula and swelling to completion. The \u201cbowelism\u201d of these remarkable pieces is, however, representational rather than functional.
\nUnlike the brief Brit architectural fashion that went by the same name, there\u2019s nothing flowing through these tubes and the brilliance of Pesce\u2019s representationalism is that the focus on form has \u2013 among others \u2013 a pictorial impetus, that the nature of the materials is imbricated in the image, in the severity of their artificial relationship to what is being depicted and in the fact that their literal materiality is completely alien from the purpose of the represented.\u00a0His \u201cCappa\u201d \u2013 a kitchen range hood \u2013 is festooned with literally depicted fruits and vegetables and certainly suits the culinary mood.\u00a0 It\u2019s a completely delightful still life and an inedible image. As an artistic subject it is about a preoccupation that spans millennia, not about the precious rupture of iconoclastic modernity. Pesce appreciates that whatever the conceptual ornamentation that papers the visual field, certain preoccupations are eternal to an embodied species. Let\u2019s eat! This idea of embodiment suffuses too his \u201cItaly on the Cross\u201d in which a red resin representation of the country is splayed on a black cross. Dripping from its boot onto the floor below, la patria is depicted like a tray of offal: bloody, organic. Pesce\u2019s message is tied up in an idea about the country crucified by a political class incapable of solving its problems, too invested in corruption and the self-promotions of struggles for power to care. He poses the problem as a conflict between social health and mediocrity and the image he presents of the country as \u201cmeat\u201d is at once succinct and grotesque, good qualities in polemical art. But, judged against the larger field of Pesce\u2019s production, the figure of Italy speaks, in the flagrancy of it biology, to the core of a beloved idea about the essence of objects, the way in which they never lose their quality as both avatars and surrogates for the body. An image that might arouse disgust must be read against an idea of delicacy that Pesce would see as too superficial, skin deep. The image is shocking and affectionate at once.
\nIt isn\u2019t possible, however, to discuss Pesce\u2019s work without attention to the truly winning wit that hovers over all of it, the simultaneous challenge it offers, on the one hand, to the pathos of modernism and, on the other to the bathos of kitsch. Consider the horse cabinet, based on an image nominally plucked from the middle ground of the Crucifixion by Altichiero da Verona, it is no less than the portrait of a horse\u2019s ass, a one-liner redeemed by its learned referent, by the nicely sinuous void between the legs, by the utility of the cabinet, by the ingenuity of the hinges.\u00a0\u00a0This wonderful unity of gesturing and jestering is made especially transparent in the \u201cGiullare\u201d couch in which the seat backs attenuate into the tassels of a jester\u2019s cap, a kind of ornamental supplement that intrudes softly on the basic work of sitting as an arm around the shoulder, an elephant\u2019s trunk in the lap, or simply as an excess, the stuff of humor, something to be discharged.
\nOf course, all ornament is, by definition, supplementary and Pesce has long had a genius for pushing the envelope of meaning\u2019s surfeit.\u00a0 The new \u201crange\u201d of seating that takes the image of some jagged Alps for its back, forests for its arms, and waterfalls for its seat is typical of a prediliction that has previously looked for a singularity in the eccentricity of urban skylines, crumbled rags, sunsets, shoulders, pasta tangles, and other aggrandizable distributors of meaning. Indeed, if humor is understood to reside in the unexpectedness of juxtapositions, in its capacity to resolve the idea of incompatibility, then humor is the driving impulse behind much of the immediate expressivity of Pesce\u2019s work at every scale.
\nPesce\u2019s recent architectural projects are likewise almost always droll and represent a kind of disaggregated, global Bomarzo, a collection of anthropomorphic grotesques, increasingly miniaturized, and, mainly self-realized. Of course, these works always make\u00a0 a kind of joke, whether in the representation, the gigantism, the unexpectedness, or the sheer flamboyance of the project.
\nThe Bahia house offers a repertoire of Pescean moves, the fa\u00e7ade as face, the distribution of aedicular, familial, elements, the elaboration of surfaces \u2013 whether in the figuration of resin floors or the applique of scales to the exterior \u2013 and the broad \u2013 even funky \u2013 palette of materials which are sourced in both the vernacular and the industrial and juxtaposed with characteristic and evocative freedom, angular planking edging flamboyant, flowy, resin. His \u201cTrullo\u201d shows a characteristic doubling, a multiplicity that is meant to suggest that even an individual as singular as this is, in fact, a member of a species, a life\/form that is replicable in a way that nevertheless always produces a difference.
\nMany of Pesce\u2019s most interesting furniture projects \u2013 like the Sessantuna table \u2013 are designed to be produced via a process that insistently yields a series of individuals, sometimes via the \u201cliberation\u201d of the worker who makes them to impart the variation.\u00a0 Sessantuna also aggregates to produce a mammoth map of Italy, a constantly recurring figure, an abiding muse in Pesce\u2019s work, and another site \u2013 like the inclusion of the worker in a collaboration to produce the singularity of the object \u2013 for the expression of the political. Indeed, Italy is the genus in which these species nest, the key to the shared genetic character of each individual, repository of the banked of DNA.
\nI do love the Trulli, simple and simply wonderful with their benign faces, green tonsures, rippled skin and human coloration, their goitered projections, faces on the face, noses attenuated like Pinocchio or carnival masks. And, they\u2019re keepers of the code: the nature of their two-ness is at the core of Pesce\u2019s project of family building. That they are non-identical twins is both the key and the limit to their own replicability. Here is a politics of the object for out time, an idea that mass-production must find tools for the constant inscription of sufficient variety to give every individual an idea of privacy and privilege. Pesce never makes too many of anything but his idea is not that what he makes therefore becomes precious from the stand-point of pure consumption, too valuable to share. It\u2019s more like your mother\u2019s recipe for pasta sauce: singular but finding its life in the on-going imperfection of its transmission.
\n