WORKS

These lamps, designed between the end of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies (and similar in their conception to the “Babele” table), emerged more or less as a derivation or contextualization of the furnishings produced for Gianni Pettena’s studio-home on Piazza Donatello in Florence. In a way their design was an attempt to reconstruct a “quasi-domestic” setting by using objets trouvés, i.e. mass-produced elements recycled in different contexts, and in this case with the function of household furniture. Some of the lamps, especially the “tree-shaped” ones, also conjured up a stylized nature. Like the “Babele” table, they were to some extent reminiscent of a redesigned nature. The designs remained at the prototype stage, and were never brought into production owing to the growing disinterest of their author: once he had finished with the project of his studio, Pettena withdrew more and more from the world of design, preferring the pure metaphor of the installation, of the artist’s work, in which the function is temporarily suspended pending the improvement of its quality through language.