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Intriguing and irregular, tha’s what Ron Gilad’s objects are like. They appeal because they have that ‘certain something’. Difficult to explain but enough to please. Then you approach them and you discover that they’re not games, or maybe they are very serious games. Because behind the elegant and minimal – but never minimalist – forms, which give the nod to the taste of our time, there is a thought, an idea, an obsession
To reject whatever is ordinary or predictable, to go one step further. To cross the threshold of perception. To turn a concept into an object, an idea into a three-dimensional form. What is a table if not a surface with four legs, placed at 90°? And then Ron decides to cut the angle in half, to 45°, and to rotate it.
New forms. New proportions. Good proportions. He draws the shape of a void in colour. And out comes a small table with a yellow, red and blue profile. He plays with coloured reflexes that mirror each other, making the forms disappear. He takes a piece of wood and inserts it in the wall, like a scratch, to create the illusion that the surface is soft.
And lo and behold – a shelf! He has fun opening boxes and imagining hidden treasures. More tables. Another table, he calls it Panna cotta. A paradox of fragile stability, to challenge the force of gravity. Ron Gilad says that success is a side effect, and not what drives him. No, he is driven by obsessions, the need to say something about the world through objects, the need to pose new problems instead of solving them.
He is driven by dissatisfaction, by looking for further insight, by the desire to learn. The amazing thing that Ron Gilad discovered in Brianza is that there is someone who, starting from things, feeds on obsessions to turn them into projects. Because behind it all there is history, culture, technique. And respect for irregular objects. Yes, Ron, we can
Born 1972 Tel-Aviv. Lives and works in New York City Ron Gilad’s hybrid objects combine material wit with aesthetic play. They sit on the fat, delicious line between the abstract and the functional.
His works deal with the relationship between the object and its function, questioning our perceptions. Varying from one-off to limited editions and production pieces, the works have no “expiration date” and reside in both public and private collections worldwide.
Gilad asks unceasing questions in 3D form and fabricates answers that create an arena for fertile doubt. Metaphorically, Gilad is a linguist, creating his own language. He learns the origins of “words” and develops “synonyms”.
Standing desks have a long and illustrious history: polymath Leonardo da Vinci was rumoured to have used them in the 15th century, followed by the likes of Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll, Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolf. Early proponents commissioned high desks directly from carpenters, or used the taller shelves of bookcases, until manually adjustable sit-stand desks were invented that used hand cranks, pins, screws, or gas cylinders that compress and expand. UniFor’s latest workstation, however, the Spring System designed by architect Antonio Citterio, uses springs to counteract the weight of the desk as it rises.
When Monk re-enters Molteni&C’s catalogue this year, it will mark 35 years since the chair was last in production. “Designed by Afra and Tobia Scarpa, ‘Monk’ is simple and solid,” reads the company’s 1990 catalogue, the simple serif font set off by a photograph of two Monk chairs, tipped back on their rear legs as if preparing to march forward. Today, as Monk prepares itself to step foot into the present, this description of “simple and solid” remains a strong summation of its virtues, but the chair's simplicity conceals the sophistication of the design approach that led to its initial creation back in 1973.
The catalogue for UniArm, the new monitor arm from UniFor, opens with a few pages of closeup photography of the arm’s sleek, hinged form, followed by a double-page spread filled with an X-ray image of the product.
