Molteni&C | Dada | UniFor Celebrates NYCxDESIGN

THE COLLECTOR’S HOUSE.
A New Generation of Italian Artists.

May 2018 saw the inauguration of the new Molteni&C Flagship Store on Madison Avenue: two floors and over 1200 sqm, redesigned by the brand’s Creative Director Vincent Van Duysen, to showcase the furniture produced by the historic Italian company. Plus a new “first”: alongside time-honoured pieces, and equally iconic new products, it featured artworks by up-and-coming young Italian talents. Design, combined with art, creates an aesthetic whole in which both languages are enhanced and, together, they give rise to a home environment that is at once an intimate refuge and a social space.

An ideal art collection that promotes the work of the latest generations of Italian artists with a broad and discerning public, offering these young talents innovative exhibition and commercial platforms; but The Collector’s House is also a real collection, which develops with new acquisitions at each stage of the project. It is headed by the Molteni Museum, a creative centre set up in 2015 alongside the headquarters of the company in Brianza and winner of the Corporate Art Award 2017.

This project, which reflects a cultured and mindful lifestyle, now sees a new exhibit in Molteni&C’s New York Flagship Store, in partnership with the young Milanese art gallery Clima, featuring the works of four of the most interesting artists on Italy’s edgiest art scene: Gianluca Concialdi (1981), Cleo Fariselli (1982), Matteo Nasini (1976) and Valerio Nicolai (1988).

Gianluca Concialdi paints with tempera on both sides of large sheets of pounce paper, usually measuring approximately 2 meters x 2, depicting enigmatic fluctuating shapes that recall objects of everyday life, but also symbolic forms, all invariably intriguing because they linger in that dimension suspended between ordinariness and vision. Cleo Fariselli’s busts of the Gran Papa series seem to draw on classical iconography, but the powerful and intuitive blind gestures, impressed by the hands of the artist on clay -and afterward cast into ceramic dental plaster-express a very contemporary sense of mutability and precariousness. The same emotive and symbolic result is found in the dual sculpture, similar to a pair of eyes which, from the Flagship Store window, seeks to make eye-contact with the people passing down Madison Avenue.

In his exercises in abstracting the landscape into polychrome structures, inspired by avantgarde languages, Matteo Nasini conducts a purely aesthetic research which, however, by his own admission, is “polluted” by his musical background:

«I realize that when I draw, I am constantly thinking about the sound. For me this element is strictly linked with the colors and with how I develop the lines».

The blend of painting, sculpture and reality created by Valerio Nicolai goes beyond the confines of the frame, often not only metaphorically, in the poignant attempt to represent the world on a scale of 1:1. Despite their different languages and intentions, the works of these four artists are all equally capable of creating a kind of sensual friction between their raw energy and the sophisticated slickness of the furniture pieces by Molteni&C which makes this dialogue between art and design particularly meaningful.


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