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Maurizio Perticarini
Half a Century for Cobra
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Alfonso Femia is among the 23 designers who have celebrated the famous lamp by Elio Martinelli. On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Cobra, the Martinelli Luce company organized a commemorative project. The idea came from Emiliana Martinelli (daughter of Elio) president and designer of the Lucca company. Emiliana, who is presenting a version of the lamp painted by a checkered texture, asked a group of important designers to communicate their vision, their suggestions through a reinterpretation of the lamp. By means of a simple texture, the artists then modified the skin of the object, without altering its form and therefore its recognizability, however enriching the original project with meanings. The twenty-three designers have therefore made real limited editions of this symbol of the Sixties that were exposed last February 27 at the Triennale di Milan at the Cobra Texture press conference. Elio Martinelli's lamp represents the profound transformations that characterized the Sixties, starting from the material used: a steel base and a body in thermohardening resin, new frontier in the field of design, shaped by first industrial printing techniques. These were the years of the Student Movement which was an extraordinary moment of civil growth but led inexorably to clashes and deep political and social divisions. Cobra, closed on itself, is inscribed in a sphere, almost to recall an embryonic state of becoming, a fetus of a new feeling, which is apparently compliant, orderly and perfect. Like the terrestrial globe, now aware of the atrocities of war, it is ready to turn into a threatening snake manifesting all the aggressiveness of that historic moment. The use of a joint in the thinnest part of the lamp allows the complete rotation of the illuminating head and the center of gravity immediately moves out of its own balance, the object stops the action at a moment, assuming the appearance of a Cobra about to attack. Nature and geometry, purity, the essentiality of form, are cleverly used by Martinelli to conceive an intact and imperturbable object, but at the same time dynamic, with a strong potential charge, like the hand of an artist closed on the pencil, but that will soon surprise us with the extemporaneousness of its features.
Alfonso Femia, teacher of Architectural Design at Kent State University of Florence and at the Faculty of Architecture of Ferrara and Genoa, architect and designer collaborator of the Martinelli company, stands out among the twenty-three participants involved in the Call, for the originality of its revisiting and to have somehow highlighted the actuality of the object. His idea is encouraged by the artist Arthur Simony, a very sensitive personality whose poetics is based on the peculiar use of words. The body of the Cobra becomes a support, a blackboard for the entropic spread of a true and just mantra. Three words: Love, Realism, Imaginary, words that are fixed in the mind of the architect Femia and that best describe his general approach to design and, perhaps, the approach of many others. They find harmony, coexisting in the same instant in a continuous whirlwind, revealing all his introspection. Arthur realizes real spirals that blend together almost in a flow of consciousness. The message is a manifesto, a history overwriting, a complaint similar to that of today writers, where the lamp is an architectural vehicle of condemnation. Examples of the increasingly widespread art of graffiti, of artists such as Millo and Blu, who base their art on contrasts. The theme of the spiral with its black on white or white on black contrasts recalls inadvertently that tendency of using optical art throughout the Sixties when artists wanted to induce a state of perceptual instability, stimulating and engaging the viewer. All this reveals a thrust towards the return to the rudimentary, to the handcraft, to the manual trait that is the only direct means that transfers thought into action. The twitch of the Cobra, therefore, becomes beneficial, no longer dangerous; it becomes a weapon of change instead. Femia and Simony, therefore, do nothing but tread the lively relevance of the project. Martinelli reminds us that the power of design lies in the stroke and in the first sketches, in a today's context where even technology, which is having a social development becoming accessible to everyone and that on the one hand facilitates the development of complex forms based on parametric algorithms, on the other hand is giving a strong contribution to the development of hardware closer to the pencil.
Angelo Micheli ph. Laiza Tonali
Adolini+ Simonini Associati
Brian Sironi
ph.Benvenuto Saba
Alfonso Femia
Donia Maaoui
Emiliana Martinelli
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