Moderno & Moderno
On February 1983, Saporiti Italia presents at the Galleria del Milione in Milan, a spectacular and extremely innovative collection of artworks and design objects, curated by Salvati & Tresoldi.
The exhibition presents about thirty of the most interesting objects designed for Saporiti Italia between 1960 and 1983 by designers such as Alberto Rosselli, Vittorio Introini, Giovanni Offredi and Salvati & Tresoldi themselves, with as many works by the greatest Italian artists of the 20th century, including Burri, Capogrossi, Dorazio, Fontana, Manzoni, Melotti, Merz, Paladino, Pistoletto, Rotella, Schifano, Zorio…
Salvati & Tresoldi play by combining design objects with art pieces, creating harmonies or contrasts between the colors and shapes of the ones and the others.
What is the reason for a success that has no limits of borders, cultures and mentalities?
The answer may be that the fundamental and winning element of Saporiti Italia lies in having identified three categories which are the pillars of sensoriality – the tactile, the textural and the linear – and in having made a concrete and very rigorous program of productive choices within the often aseptic, or sometimes confusing, panorama of furniture design.
Precisely because of its simplicity, elegance and extreme decantation of the formal element, the design distilled by Saporiti’s architects is as bare as possible, but linearly precise and calibrated and tuned like the sound of a harp in the silence.
It emerges as a controlled virtuosity, never baroque, never expressionist – but also never tautologically modern nor regressively classic. The classicism of the Saporiti style lies, indeed, in its basic primitivism. In its keeping the existential impact with the object, in a prefabricated modernistic rationalism. Indeed, we have a direct, childish, joy and amazement, which invite us to touch, to caress, to “affectively” enjoy.
Riccardo Barletta
From the Catalogue of the Moderno & Moderno Exhibition at Galleria del Milione
