The “hasty, almost indifferent” greeting and an “excessive” silence gave way to the voices and applause of a warm tribute with memories, testimonies, video projections and with the first gold medal ever awarded by Iulm university. The one dedicated to the great architect and designer Gaetano Pesce it was supposed to be a masterclass and it turned into the evening in memoriam organized by the rector Gianni Canova and from Silvana Annicchiaricoformer director of the Design museum of the Triennale, in which her two children Milena and Jacopo who arrived from New York also participated.
But it is still too little: «Milan makes internationalization its banner but when the most international designer there is passes away, he brings out his provincialism and does not honor him as he deserves – underlines Canova -. Pesce was guilty of the most serious crime, being a free man. He belonged to no one: not to the right and not to the left, not to the secularists and not to the Catholics, not to the rationalists and not to the decorativists. This is considered fault in a country that for too long has rewarded belonging rather than intelligence and competence. Pesce, master of sometimes uncomfortable and never subservient trespassing, left us a fundamental teaching: art, when it is dominated by power (any power), is not worthy of the name.”
Le Monde he counts him among the «most influential and significant architects and designers in modern history», defining him as a «both playful and political figure», and this is the image that his children also convey. «He taught us to be curious and to pursue everyone’s diversity, which is wealth. We children have always followed him everywhere: no one would have ever dared to compete with a monster of modernity and avant-garde like our father. We are thinking about how to take up the legacy of his work to keep his memory alive”, says his daughter Milena.
His son Jacopo remembers the days spent together in the car listening to surprising music: «At 84 he loved electronic music and Deep Forest, with ethnic sounds too. We could have found ourselves in Bassano eating asparagus or in Brazil for Christmas and we didn’t miss the Salone del Mobile in Milan.”
From 19 to 23 April, his monographic exhibition will remain open at the Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana Nice to see you; His monumental installation stands out in front, “The Tired Man”, a gigantic silhouette of a man on four legs, to convey that humiliation in front of power, so much so that he doesn’t even know how to react to the madness of war. «Pesce experiments, enlarges, hybrids, contaminates – recalls Silvana Annicchiarico, who met him 23 years ago and never left him professionally, struck by his intelligence -. It was a point of reference, for me. A true radical, visionary, unhinged, never aligned with power, uncomfortable due to his energy of thought and action.”
He designed coat hangers in very colorful transparent resin, lamps with organic shapes, objects that always started from the body and from the strangest, most innovative material. Annicchiarico still remembers: «At the time he was working on the Made in Italy exhibition curated by Settembrini: he created mountains of parmesan, lakes of oil, meadows of basil, fountains of sparkling wine, armchairs of spaghetti. At first they were perfumes, then rotting odors that crept into the Palazzo dell’Arte and remained glued to the walls for months.” He was a cumbersome presence, visionary and “free as few have been able to be”. Pesce was coherent but also inconsistent: «Indeed he was a supporter of inconsistency because he believed that one could also be free to change one’s mind».
