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The
muse as recurring motif…we're not entirely sure if we quite like
the work of Milanese designer Piero Fornasetti, but Fornasetti
more than liked Lina Cavalieri's face when it stared out at
him from a magazine: wide almond eyes and dreamy mysterious stare,
sensual mouth, dark features and pale skin, the sphinx-like
mystery of her femininity, a muse transformed into motif that he
reproduced on his famous plates in endless variations and whose
face now stares out from chairs and vases, even teapots….
She was a famous opera singer he had never met. It was an obsession.
And then the compulsion to fix her visage, transforming her into
something like the boteh of paisley…but of course the
difference is that his motifs are not abstractions, and therein,
we think, lies the difference….
Adam and
Eve plates
His
work is possessed of a certain imaginative wit. Other
recurring themes: playing cards, sun, moon and stars, Piranesi-like
engravings. There are the famous Adam and Eve plates,
a set of 24, representing Adam and Eve,
deconstructed. Fornasetti
was inspired by a wide variety of sources: Picasso, Dali, Op Art,
Surrealism, Ravenna, Renaissance architecture. His
compulsion for repetition paralleled developments in Surrealism
and Dada, as did the use of feminine iconography and the often
fetishistic insistence on a limited set of loaded imagery:
sunflowers, fish, Roman architecture all recur with remarkable
persistency. Pages from newspapers in Italian and Hebrew,
acrobats. The ludic or playful element is part of the quirky
charm. Fornasetti later collaborated with Giò Ponti, the
Milanese architect and designer, decorating pieces of furniture
that Ponti designed. We like the pieces where the decoration
is most abstracted, as in the chair below, butterflies transformed
into leopard-like spots...
Giò
Ponti and Piero Fornasetti, Armchair, 1951
There
was something of a revival of interest in his work in the 80s,
when collectors began looking for vintage pieces. Of these,
the most wanted are the ones with the characteristic bold black
and white trompe l'oeil motifs. His oeuvre is really about
the idea of surface decoration that is representational gone mad,
gone industrial….and even Fornasetti himself had no idea as to why he did
what he did: "What inspired me to create more than 500
variations on the face of a woman? I don't know. I
began to make them and I never stopped." We think his
work has contradictory implications: an argument for abstract
pattern in surface decoration, but also an affirmation of the
eccentric!
Explore:
Fornasetti,
Designer of Dreams, Patrick Mauries, amazon.com
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