Condominium

Furniture and site-specific objects for Martino Gamper's first solo exhibition at the Franco Noero Gallery.

This story could start from the end, with what the public does not see, perhaps, and with all the surplus piled and accumulated along a back wall in this space in Piazza Santa Giulia. The shutter is down on the gallery's project room overlooking the square. Martino and his staff worked here for weeks. The machinery, tools and saws all travelled from London to Turin and the two available rooms were turned into a workshop, joiner's and art studio. The stacked shreds of furniture are just the negative, what was left after the cutting, dismantling and reassembly that allowed this designer from Alto Adige to create the objects and furniture that now inhabit the pinched, slanting and fragile spaces of the famous and remarkable wedge-shaped Casa Scaccabarozzi building. Known as the Fetta di Polenta (slice of polenta) to the people of Turin, it was chosen in 2008 by the artists of the Noero gallery for their site-specific projects.

Gamper stayed in Turin for more than a month, his only request a small bed that he placed on the top floor of the Fetta. Then, he started exploring the city and its objects, starting from that room as he tried to get a feel of its proportions and gauge the size of the works for this exhibition in relation to that 'slice' of the city with such a special history and geometry. After arriving in Turin, Gamper started searching for, selecting and collecting second-hand furniture: sideboards, tables, cupboards and bedside-tables in the materials and shapes that distinguished the domestic interiors of a certain Piedmontese middle-class between the 1950s and 1970s. The odd piece of handmade furniture, post-war Italian kitchen tables—with metal legs and coloured Formica tops—painted and polished wooden cupboards that, when sliced through, reveal a lightweight section of compressed cardboard between two layers of laminate.

Top: Martino Gamper, <i>Condominium,</i> 2011: view of the third floor. Courtesy Martino Gamper and Gallery Franco Noero. Photo Sebastian Pellion di Persano. Above: Martino Gamper, <i>Condominium,</i> 2011: view of the seventh floor. Courtesy Martino Gamper and Gallery Franco Noero. Photo Sebastian Pellion di Persano. — Top: Martino Gamper, *Condominium,* 2011: view of the third floor. Courtesy Martino Gamper and Gallery Franco Noero. Photo Sebastian Pellion di Persano. Above: Martino Gamper, *Condominium,* 2011: view of the seventh floor. Courtesy Martino Gamper and Gallery Franco Noero. Photo Sebastian Pellion di Persano.

The first objects were created and installed to satisfy some of Martino's primary needs: two baskets, shelving and the structure of a wooden chair screwed to the wall (after two slanting cuts altered the leg section) to serve as a clothes rail—a rigid but also flexible support for bags and clothes hangers. Little by little, the architecture of the Fetta was inhabited by Gamper's unique pieces, designed and made for every corner of the building. The house has become condominium, with every floor narrating the life of an imaginary inhabitant. Each piece of furniture is an object subjected to a work of removal—sliced crosswise at the side or base, repainted, reassembled and transformed—and the floors of the building that is home to the Turin gallery look to visitors' eyes like portions of space, apartments and domestic interiors cut out with scissors and arranged in a new order and relationship.

Top: Martino Gamper, <i>Condominium,</i> 2011: view of the ground floor. Courtesy Martino Gamper and Gallery Franco Noero. Photo Sebastian Pellion di Persano. — Top: Martino Gamper, *Condominium,* 2011: view of the ground floor. Courtesy Martino Gamper and Gallery Franco Noero. Photo Sebastian Pellion di Persano.

The life conjured up by Martino Gamper with his objects—his condominium designed for just a few people—in the five storeys of the Fetta is intertwined with private spaces, the rooms where gallery owner Franco Noero lives in Turin. The game of piecing together is all the more complex in the domestic interior and the building becomes a small community where the story of the life portrayed and imagined by Martino criss-crosses with everyday reality. The days Gamper and his assistant spent in the house producing the works, the gallery owner's daily routine and the space set up for additional imaginary inhabitants by the designer from Alto Adige.

The fragments, corners and details of the city and its feel seem to have been gathered here in the condominium in the form, geometry and colour of the new and unique pieces composed by Martino Gamper.

Top: Martino Gamper, <i>Condominium,</i> 2011: view of the fourth floor. Courtesy Martino Gamper and Gallery Franco Noero. Photo Sebastian Pellion di Persano. — Top: Martino Gamper, *Condominium,* 2011: view of the fourth floor. Courtesy Martino Gamper and Gallery Franco Noero. Photo Sebastian Pellion di Persano.

The entrance hall on the ground floor is filled with multicoloured chairs and as this space in Casa Scaccabarozzi originally had a retail function, he has almost restored the shop feel. The seats have been given new colours, the Formica of the standard tubular-steel chairs has been replaced with coloured wooden inlays and two shaped and coloured wooden 'boxes' are fixed to the wall at visitors' back height; designed as elbow and body rests, they offer an alternative way of standing, talking and watching the city go by outside the two windows on the street.

On the first floor of the building, the only dual-height space, Gamper has furnished the platform by cutting the legs of the chairs collected, re-proportioning the space in section and exploiting the wood removed from the chairs to make a small table, cut obliquely to create an irregular geometry for the top. One of the floors is given over to reading with the room occupied by a trapezoidal-design bookcase. In this case, the piece was not made via the process of cutting and reassembly but installed in the space by compression and traction. Slightly reminiscent of Albini, the bookcase-furniture composed by fitting together segments of square-section wood seems to react to the compressed space of the Fetta, exercising pressure between the floor and ceiling of the seemingly fragile architecture.

Top: Martino Gamper, <i>Condominium,</i> 2011: view of the sixth floor. Courtesy Martino Gamper and Gallery Franco Noero. Photo Sebastian Pellion di Persano. — Top: Martino Gamper, *Condominium,* 2011: view of the sixth floor. Courtesy Martino Gamper and Gallery Franco Noero. Photo Sebastian Pellion di Persano.

Objects designed ex-novo by Gamper—a lamp made by screening and cutting the light of a bulb with five surfaces of veneered, coloured and inlaid wood—blend perfectly with the pieces born out of separation and reassembly. The fragments, corners and details of the city and its feel seem to have been gathered here in the condominium in the form, geometry and colour of the new and unique pieces composed by Martino Gamper. However, the exhibition itself might just be Martino's most meaningful work—the decision to build a relationship with Turin and its objects and the combinatorial ability to mix and carve out domestic interiors, private life and experimentation in the composition of detail. Every collector will take pleasure in buying the pieces and taking a portion of this unusual inhabited organism home with them.
Francesco Garutti