Sergio RaggioArt & Design

An unexpected encounter takes place at the Fuori Salone. I see a familiar face inside the hall n. 20, Sancta Sanctorum of the contemporary furniture manufacturers, on the top floor of the fair, in the presence of international design gods: it’s Sergio Raggio.

Eclectic, funny, smart, out of the box Sergio fully embodies the contemporary artist. We hadn’t met for ages! It’s like a prophetic encounter for me, dealing with the Design Week mechanisms for the first time. I can’t miss this chance: he will be my spiritual guide to the complex art & design duo. Complex for common mortals like me, of course.

We walk through the Knoll, Kartell, Poltrona Frau, Cassina pieces. We talk about the Fuori Salone, created to highlight architects and emerging designers which are unable to bear the costs of exhibition spaces at the main fair and find hospitality in alternative, ad hoc locations in Brera, Via Tortona and more recently Lambrate. Over time, the Fuori Salone has become the real Design Week attraction, with its unmissable parties and inevitable parade of celebrities not only from the design world.

While we pass through the halls, he tells me about his production.

His works come from a multidisciplinary study on languages, images and signs used in contemporary art, design, architecture and applied arts.

Artistic movements and modern avant-gardes that mostly arouse his curiosity are reinterpreted in three-dimensional shapes, developed with the help of a CAD software typically used in architecture.

It’s a research on empathy of shapes, like in the Gummies and Googies series: these are inspired by a modern American architectural current from the ‘50s/’60s known as googie architecture or space age, in which shapes and colours are sculptural, soft and futuristic, with curves and dynamic lines.

In the Cosmic latte series the only colour he uses is known as colour of the universe, which represents the average hue of light emitted by celestial bodies and selected by an astronomer team at Johns Hopkins University.

Forms are designed in a parametric way, as if they were real objects with physical dimensions; their images are projected through a Photo Rendering process and then printed in large size with fine-art printers and ink pigments. The result is an incredibly deep and defined image. They are like pictures of virtual sculptures that could be printed in 3D or by robotic cutters.

Prints are made on photo-quality paper or canvas and then mounted on aluminium.

Each work is catalogued with a name and serial number exactly like industrial products. Plastic colours and shapes, with rounded edges and smooth surfaces, invite you to caress them.

Bravo Sergio!

Contacts: Sergio Raggio