Gaetano Pesce
Designer
During his career, which spans four decades with commissions in architecture, urban planning, interior, exhibition, and industrial design, Gaetano Pesce, the architect, and designer, has conceived public and private projects in the United States, Europe, Latin America, and Asia. In all his work, he expresses his guiding principle: that modernism is less a style than a method for interpreting the present and hinting at the future in which individuality is preserved and celebrated. Born in La Spezia, Italy, in 1939, Pesce studied Architecture at the University of Venice between 1958 to 1963 and was a participant in Gruppo N, an early collective concerned with programmed art patterned after the Bauhaus.
Exhibited at DESIGN MIAMI.BASEL 2024 In the Arca Desk, we see the imprint of Catholicism on Pesce, an Italian inheritance, profound, deep and complex. But the design speaks even more broadly than that, to the intensity of any ritual experience, or rite of passage. A touch of the spirit is present in the dripping “blood,” a resin that Pesce applied to the brick-like units of the desk. He completed this procedure upside-down, so that once the whole piece was completed and inverted, the liquid would seem to rise to the sky—a gesture of transcendence. The title Arca recalls the Biblical ark of the covenant, though he has said that he was more directly referring to a medieval monument in the Basilico San Domenico in Bologna. The desk has an architectural quality, suggesting two piers holding up a great cathedral’s vault. Materials: wood bricks and gel coat.
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