PARIS.- PIASA announces their next auction of Italian Design, to be held in Paris on Tuesday 15 April 2014 at 6pm.

Running to nearly 300 lots, and with a total estimate of around €1.5m, the sale will be the last one to be organized by PIASA at their Rue du Bac venue. The presentation has been assigned to Didier Benderli – KERYLOS INTERIEURS.

Tribute to Lorenzo Burchiellaro
Sculptor, designer, master craftsman, researcher and innovator, Lorenzo Burchiellaro has always used metals. Gold and silver to begin with and then bronze, brass, aluminium, pewter and zinc, with a special affinity for copper. For many years he has designed and created jewellery, one-of-a-kind sculptures to be worn. From the very beginning, his idea was to ennoble even the commonest of metals such as aluminium and zinc that were being used in building and industry, seeking refined textures via the use of acids, oxides, patinas and etching to go beyond the exterior in order to understand each metal and to discover its secrets. Copper especially, led him to discover the occult world of chromatism. His basic tenet was, and has remained, emphasis on matter with essentiality of form.

“Lorenzo Burchiellaro…has dedicated himself to the research into new forms for objects, Ritualizing their function and enhancing their shape.

Various metals and continuous experimentation into new techniques testify to a concept of art as a courageous commitment in the creation of objects with a finely tuned dynamic, often ahead of their times and current fashions..” --Luigi Massoni, Designer, Materie e Fuoco, 1989

Important selection of works produced in the Fontana Arte workshops
Luigi Fontana founded the glass-producing firm Fontana in Milan in 1881, before pioneering the large-scale production of lamps and decorative glass elements in 1910. In 1931 Gio Ponti was appointed Art Director of Fontana Arte, and (in collaboration with Pietro Chiesa) created the firm’s artistic division.

The firm was famed for its production of glass items, many still in working order today – like the glass and brass table-lamps designed in 1954 (est. €12,000-18,000) and another dating from 1955-60 (est. €9,000-12,000).

Fontana Arte’s output reflected its designers’ understanding of the tremendous potential of blown glass. The firm even began to design and produce furniture, such as a sublime glass and silvered-bronze dining-table (est. €100,000-120,000).

Max Ingrand’s glass, brass and nickelled brass Fontana Arte ceiling-light showcases the individual materials and exploits their potential in the design and manufacture of decorative interior elements (est. €8,000-12,000).

Exceptional ensemble designed by BBPR
The BBPR agency was born of the encounter of four great Italian architects – Gianluigi Banfi, Lodovico Barbiano di Belgiojoso, Enrico Peressutti and Ernesto Nathan Rogers – in Milan in 1932. These great names would make a major contribution to the development of inter-war architectural rationalism, while their 1954 Torre Velasca near Milan Cathedral, now a symbol of the city, would be their most important work in reaction against the ‘International Style.’

Their furniture followed the rationalist trend, with comfort and aesthetics present alongside Italian elegance and refinement. Items of interior decoration to be offered on April 15 include a ceiling-light (est. €15,000-20,000); a threepart mirror (est. €4,000-6,000); a trolley (est. €4,000-6,000); and a pair of floor-lamps.

Italian Design
Northern Italy became the nerve-centre of Design during the second half of the 20th century, giving rise to a plethora of specialist companies, craftsmen, editors and quality designers. The history of Italian Design involves a series of complementary movements in dialogue with one another, and the sale outlines the history of Italian Design via its most important creators.

Major examples from this golden age of Italian Design include a rare Gio Ponti easy chair with foot-stool (est. €15,000-20,000) and a Franco Albini rockingchair made from walnut, fabric and rope (est. €18,000-22,000).

The architect Claudio Salocchi was the leading apostle of an all-embracing creative approach to interior design. His destructured revolving bookcase in Brazilian rosewood and lacquered wood reflects his characteristic break-up of forms – stretched, lengthened and extended in a centrifugal manner, revealing true mastery of the expressive potential of Contemporary Design (est. €13,000-18,000).

Another remarkable piece of furniture is Luigi Caccia Dominioni’s highly individual steel and fabric Battibius armchair, edited by Azucena in 1959. Its entomological forms offer a synthesis of his source of inspiration: to look to forms from nature as a support for everyday objects (est. €4,000-6,000).

Angelo Lelli, the founder of Arredoluce (Italy’s most innovative lighting firm of the 1950s and ’60s), stands out with his innovative research into form, matter and colour. His floor-lamp in painted metal, brass and cast iron, offering plays of shadow and light, embodies all the savoir-faire of this Italian master (est. €7,000-9,000).

Scenography - Didier Benderli Kerylos Interieurs
Was it this obsession for detail which, quite naturally, influenced the choice of Didier Benderli at the time he was still hesitating between studying architecture and art history at the Sorbonne and directing stage plays and operas?

In any event, it was in Brazil where he completed his training and developed his attraction to light, his taste for natural materials, such as wood and stone, and followed his first projects.

The rest took place in France, as artistic director with Jacques Garcia, where he learnt the importance of objects, furniture and of art in general in the profession and above all that they are at the root of all inspiration.

His first loves can still be seen in his aesthetic orientations, Brazil and Italy... He is an interior designer and an aesthete, who brings together for each project Art, modernity and classicism which becomes apparent for stories both private and public.

It is important to him to create unique spaces which literally sublimate the existing, jogs memories and makes places which one feels they have always known.

His attentiveness and profound respect for the space and personality of the master of the house which he strives to reflect creates this Proustian feeling which he calls “the memory effect”.

His style, rather eclectic, goes beyond a simple and stereotypical reply to the questions that are put to him. He endlessly searches for and is inspired by the history of the place, imagines it if necessary, and builds on the existing architecture into which he breathes new life, respectful of the past while bearing the functional aspect in mind, but without ever sacrificing aesthetics.

Forms, colours, materials and substances are confronted to better come together in a harmony which appears classical, but which always reveals itself to be unique and seductive.

Respect the beauty of volumes, make it the starting point and never forget that without them, all decoration, even the most refined, is futile.