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Poltrona di Proust Monumentale, Bisazza
Alessandro Mendini, 2005
I believe that by now my piece entitled “Poltrona di Proust” is pretty well known by a lot of people. It is a romantic and baroque chair upon which infinite hand-brushed strokes of polychrome colors have been applied using a technique called divisionism. These brushstrokes cover the whole armchair, its fabric and its wooden flourishes. It is a redesign. In fact, it is the result of a collage made up of a fake antique armchair and the detail of a meadow painted by the French artist Signac. Since 1978 the Proust armchair has been made in a succession of variants in new colors and materials. It has even been made in ceramics and bronze, and has traveled the world over.
I had been nursing a secret dream for quite some time. It was to see the Poltrona become big, very big – oversized. Enlarged so much that it would turn into a monument, an urban symbol. For the 2005 “Art of Italian Design” exhibition in Athens, there was the desire to place a macro-object in the street in front of the Museum: a piece made of that fabulous divisionist material called glass mosaic. Maybe a small tower, a kiosk, a very Italian souvenir.
“Make an enormous Poltrona di Proust”, Piero Bisazza suggested, guessing the gist of my unexpressed dream and giving it life. This collaboration of ours, with me as the designer and Piero as the industrialist, is one based on continuous and precise understanding. “All right, I will”, I answered. The project was a difficult and complex one in many ways: Statically, logistically, in its materials, the different types of glass and their colors and combinations. It was a virtuosic job that needed to be developed with manual techniques, under guidance of computers, in the Bisazza factory in Spilimbergo, which has been the home of mosaics since Roman times.
Now, lo and behold, a “Poltrona di Proust Monumentale” exists too. It is no longer just an armchair; it is a sculpture and maybe even a piece of architecture. Its multicolored glass surface brings the expressive intention that was born with the first Poltrona to an extreme limit: that of imagining something, an unreal and pulveraceous nebula, an immaterial mirage of energy. Pointillism gives way to visual fragmentation and recomposition of matter.
I had been nursing a secret dream for quite some time. It was to see the Poltrona become big, very big – oversized. Enlarged so much that it would turn into a monument, an urban symbol. For the 2005 “Art of Italian Design” exhibition in Athens, there was the desire to place a macro-object in the street in front of the Museum: a piece made of that fabulous divisionist material called glass mosaic. Maybe a small tower, a kiosk, a very Italian souvenir.
“Make an enormous Poltrona di Proust”, Piero Bisazza suggested, guessing the gist of my unexpressed dream and giving it life. This collaboration of ours, with me as the designer and Piero as the industrialist, is one based on continuous and precise understanding. “All right, I will”, I answered. The project was a difficult and complex one in many ways: Statically, logistically, in its materials, the different types of glass and their colors and combinations. It was a virtuosic job that needed to be developed with manual techniques, under guidance of computers, in the Bisazza factory in Spilimbergo, which has been the home of mosaics since Roman times.
Now, lo and behold, a “Poltrona di Proust Monumentale” exists too. It is no longer just an armchair; it is a sculpture and maybe even a piece of architecture. Its multicolored glass surface brings the expressive intention that was born with the first Poltrona to an extreme limit: that of imagining something, an unreal and pulveraceous nebula, an immaterial mirage of energy. Pointillism gives way to visual fragmentation and recomposition of matter.
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