Surprise maker
In March 2022, Italian design guru Gaetano Pecher opened his new China roadshow. From the up56 armchair to the "NoBody's Perfect Chair", to the Pratt chair and the Feltri chair, these amazing works first landed at the Today Art Museum in Beijing. Listen to the names of a few more exhibits: "Bad Words Hurt Table Lamp", "Lagoon Table", "Medusa Coffee Table", "Tired Man's Cabinet"... It seems that Pecher's world can never lose its contemplation of people or enter into an immutable repetition of success. To this day, the 83-year-old Pecher is still working hard in his studio in New York, leading a young team to experiment with new materials. He has a meticulous attention to the selection of exhibits and the way he interacts with the audience, while at the same time releasing a strong "old naughty boy" atmosphere. In an interview with VOGUE, Pecher said that he was more like an experiencer of the exhibition. In 2021, after Pecher's retrospective exhibition at Shenzhen Design Society, the staff sent him feedback from the audience, and he sighed that it was really a successful exhibition. "The success lies in the fact that my works have been reinterpreted by them in a new way, creating a new visual experience for Chinese audiences, rather than letting everyone watch my works repeatedly, which makes me more deeply realize that creativity has no boundaries and no end." Whether an artist or not, everyone has unlimited creativity. Marveling at the openness and freedom of ordinary audiences, Pecher hopes that this exhibition in Beijing will not make clear guidance for the moving line. This is undoubtedly a busy and changeable big city, "watching this exhibition, it is like roaming in the city, no one likes to follow the established route step by step, everyone enjoys roaming the city with their feelings, moods, and aimlessness, constantly discovering the feeling of surprise." "Yes, freedom, boldness, attention to process and expression, valuing every individual who interacts with the work, this is Pecher.
In Paicher's New York studio,
The "old boy" excitedly displays the new works and materials he is experimenting with
At the end of the 1950s, Pesche studied architecture in Italy. He admitted that he had gotten into a lot of trouble at the time because he didn't like going to school. "In school, the teachers always wanted us to learn what they learned when they were young, but I was very resistant to this, so I often quarreled with the teachers. I remember arguing with Carlo Scarpa (Italian modern rationalist architect who taught at the Venice University of Architecture) at that time, and I said to him in a huff, I just want to change careers, I don't want to become an architect and go to the bank to be a clerk! Of course, then our relationship got better..." Pesche had a strong sense of rebellion when he was studying, and he thought that young people needed to know what was happening in the world today than to learn what the professors had faced forty or fifty years ago. Art, design, architecture, creativity, in Pecher's view, rather than taking sides to classify themselves into a classical discipline, people in these disciplines need to always maintain a sense of freshness to the world. Time is meaningful, and so is any era. "To know what this era is leading us to do, so schools should teach students to understand the meaning of the times, to respect, to understand, to interpret the times you are in, to feel the rapid changes of the times, so as to create interesting and valuable works." 」 Thus, after Pecher later became an artist and designer, the public was always able to find metaphors related to the times through his works. Pecher believes that the era we live in has "fluidity", everything in the world changes every week and every day, and observing this era can create works related to the times. He pays attention to current affairs and politics, and he is also dissatisfied with some things, but he is secretive when he faces us. Fortunately, the work is Pecher's most honest voice, and outside of the aesthetic point of view, he always hides clues in the work, surprising the viewer and user who are interested in exploring.
Unique design, unique people
Perhaps for Pecher, having a strong curiosity was his most admirable talent. "I don't know why, I've had a lot of contradictory ideas since I was a kid. I'm not a well-organized person, just constantly exploring the outside world. "He loves to travel, even to wander. Born in Italy, he lived and worked in Paris and Hong Kong before settling in New York. During the long journey, the sunset in New York and the rain in Hong Kong were frozen in his works, as were those who passed in front of his eyes. Whenever he travels to a new place, people ask him where he would most like to go. "They might have thought I was going to say 'I want to go to the museum' and I would have replied 'I want to go to the supermarket'. In the local market, Pecher always observed the crowd with interest, listened to how people talked, saw how they dressed, and saw what they spent a lot of money on. "Because human behavior is given by the times," Pecher said. Times are constantly changing, "only curiosity can make people take the initiative to accept the difference, and joyfully welcome a different day." In the 60s, the young Pecher traveled to the Soviet Union because people said it was a violin paradise. But when I got there, I found that the truth was not what people said. So back in Italy, I suddenly realized that the idea of 'we're all the same' is wrong, we're never the same, our country is in different regions, different climates, and when the sky is clear here, other places can be cloudy. So, I thought that since the characteristics of each region are different, why should all the furniture be the same? We have technologies that can develop originality and should not be copied blindly. Since then, I've only wanted to do original, unique, artistic designs. Pecher said.
In life, Pecher would visit a restaurant over and over again because he liked the food in a restaurant, but couldn't live the repetitive days because it would make him feel "like you've only lived one day in your life." This is why Pec constantly experiments with new materials, new methods, and new forms in his designs. Pecher is widely known for his works using polyurethane resins, condensed pulp, polyurethane foam, and epoxy resins as raw materials, and the famous Feltri chair even uses thick felt to be soaked in a liquid resin, and by controlling the soaking time to make the same piece of material have different hardness. "Ahead", people often use the word to mark Peche. Dan Peche thought this was perfectly normal. Now, we travel the world by plane and train in clothes that are appropriate to the present era, and the material for Pecher follows the same logic: creation should follow the times. "My creations are sincere, and the materials selected are all from the times I live in, and they are all very commonly used materials in the 21st century. If I use iron, it's like working with materials from more than three thousand years ago. ”
Pecher's creation always chooses the material of the moment, and he always wants to try new materials, new methods, and new forms. His studio is like a laboratory, full of novelty and excitement.
In the 1960s, when Pesche dabbled in the design field, the concept of furniture was more focused on functionality and practicality, but this did not meet Pecher's ideals. "I don't like 'dumb' objects, whether it's architecture or furniture, they should be able to communicate with people, which requires giving them visible forms." So I designed chairs that looked a bit like people, some of them like insects, and they had personalities and different forms. Not everyone likes my work, and even a small number of people may like my work, but I am still very happy that my work can communicate with this small group of people. In Pecher's observation, production in the past did not exist for "people", so the objects produced had no characteristics. He wants to be a designer and artist who creates for "people", and the specific image of the human body is very worthy of attention. "When I sketch, I find that people like images that resonate with them, and objects and people themselves are immediately connected." As a result, smiling faces representing happiness appear on Crosby's chairs, and the 2018 work Medusa Coffee Table is unable to accommodate the alien outside world by recreating Medusa's image mapping. The Up56 armchair for B&B Italia was born in the 1960s, and Pecher used images such as female curves and chains to express his concern about the current situation of women being bound and oppressed by patriarchal society. Pecher believes that the "unique" of the historical period in which we live will become a visual language that facilitates communication, whether in architecture, design, or art. Rather than standing in front of a building and commenting on what looks good or bad, Pecher hopes that his creations, or the poetry, books, and music that emerge around him, can bring people to think because of their uniqueness and communication.
Boundless
When it comes to Pecher's work, the Pratt series of chairs is a presence that cannot be ignored. The creative process from Pratt No. 1 to No. 9 is itself an artistic experiment, by adjusting the chemical proportions in the resin material, the chair gradually hardens from "1" to "9"; chair No. 1 is so soft that it cannot stand, and No. 9 loses the practical value of existing in the sequence because it is too hard. Pecher sees the relationship between design and art in this way: if we give it attributes that we do not often mention on the basis of having functionality and quality, such as religion, physiology, politics, etc., we broaden the boundaries of design and art, and design becomes art. When he first entered the design circle, a female friend of Pecher suggested that he think about itself, or something that can be changed by us. Pecher's practice of more than fifty years clearly answered the friend's questions adequately. His works are so rich in content, full of emotion, and at the same time very sincere. In Pecher's view, traditional art is gradually dying, the romances that belonged to the past have been sealed in museums, and design is constantly being produced and constantly entering people's lives.
In the view of Zhang Ran, director of today Art Museum, Pecher is undoubtedly an artist, and his artworks are excellent and deep enough. In the process of communicating the exhibition, Zhang Ran was extremely impressed by Pecher's exuberant energy. Despite the screen, when the design is told to the excitement, Pecher always closes his eyes and immerses himself in the memory of the process and details. Like his work, Pesche himself is a "very strong" and humorous childlike person. Those advanced explorations, or slightly temperamental challenges, all stem from a pure heart. Zhang Ran also remembered that in an exhibition in Venice in the early years, the mayor invited Pesche to attend the opening ceremony, but it happened that he was ill, and he thought that his work was enough to express everything, and his own words were not important, so he commissioned his friends to issue a death statement and evaded attendance with fraudulent death, which showed Pesche's boldness and ridicule.
This time, Pecher and his studio also designed a translucent curtain for some of the works in the exhibition, hiding part of the vision and adding rich layers to the presentation of the exhibition. Pecher also brought his own classic fish-shaped resin invitation (since "Pecher" means "fish" in Italian)... All kinds of ingenuity has been realized with the strong support of Today Art Museum, all of which hope to trigger a deeper, more direct and more interesting interaction between the audience and the work. Many architectural manuscripts will also be exhibited at the same time, and Zhang Ran said after reading them that Pesche's ideas were too fanciful. At the other end of the spectrum, in New York, Pesche imagined the future at the end of the interview. He is looking forward to, perhaps, that one day, his dream architectural project, pluralist Tower, can actually land. On that tower, every architect could claim one of the tower floors for creation, and eventually the tower looked different from a distance. "It is precisely because everyone is different that communication and exchange constitute communication and exchange, which is democracy. In my conception, democracy is about protecting diversity, but until now no company or contractor can take on the project. Just think, maybe there will be a company in China in the future that can help me achieve it. Pesche said with a smile.
Photo by Laurie Bartley
Author: Yan Xia
Edited by: Jing Zhang