Meeting Gaetano Pesce in 2022: the art of impermanence

Gaetano Pesce is keeping busy. The iconic New York-based multidisciplinary artist who has been active for over six decades continues to reinvent himself through provoking and unconventional work transcending traditional notions of art, architecture and design. Upon visiting Pesce’s studio in the Navy Yard of Brooklyn, I was told that he and his team were in the process of adding an additional space close by, adding further incandescence and excitement to the incredibly colorful space. “We start a new moment for this workshop,” he ponders. “It’s strange but this is a moment of karma.” Working closely with his youthful crew, the artist is very much at the center of this energetic enterprise – a spacious environment where new ideas are both thought out and put into production. 

Visiting the space at this pivotal time was like peeking into Pesce’s tireless creative mind, where artefacts of his illustrious career live harmoniously with brand new designs. A unique example of his Mamma chair in cork— arguably one of his most recognized furniture pieces— sits next to prototype vases and tables in resin; a pair of shoes from his environmental installation at MoMA in 1972 can be seen next to a unique new chair combining felt and resin; and up on a shelf in the distance, a couple of My Mountains vases made with polyurethane hint at his latest project, a solo show at the Aspen Art Museum. 

The exhibition, closing October 9, provided Pesce with the opportunity to further explore the notion of place— and in this particular case Aspen, a town in Colorado that he knows well. “In Aspen, I had the idea to show what could be the architecture of today,” says Pesce. “I wanted to change the façade of the museum to reflect what really represents Aspen.” And that he did, in his typically exuberant and colorful fashion, re-designing one entire exterior wall to depict the sun setting over a mountainous landscape. “We forget that architecture is an art, and each place deserves to be properly represented by the artist-architect— not in terms of material, but to reflect the spirit of the place”, he explains. On the inside, the exhibition further explores themes surrounding Colorado’s natural landscape. Bright-colored tree lamps and tree vases rub shoulders with bespoke leaf cabinets in resin also created for the occasion. Recent work is also put forward, notably new furniture from his Nobody’s Perfect series originally launched in 2002 and three examples of his bidimensional Skin characters which depict unique figures with personalities of their own. 

Vases may be regarded as one of his favorite forms. Throughout his oeuvre, Pesce has designed a countless number of vessels, each taking on a unique form and personality of their own – using a range of subjects as inspiration, from spaghetti and lava to flames and trees, not to mention mountains. Often colorful, irregular and eccentric, they unapologetically embrace figuration and reject passive abstraction, thus becoming living entities in and of themselves. “Vases are a very important element of life and have always been treated as a life-generating object. When you have flowers, that is where you put them, with water; we are also all born out of a vase – the womb of a woman – and when we die, our ashes are placed in a type of vase – an urn.” Last year at Design Miami, he presented perhaps his most evocative vase yet, a large-scale floor vessel in resin with legs and a semi-circular bowl shaped like a womb – a metaphor that surely can’t be missed. 

The work on view in “My Dear Mountains”, overwhelmingly made with polyurethane resin, his medium of choice, embodies the notions of intellectual freedom and malleability that are so central to Mr. Pesce’s artistic preoccupations. Incredibly adaptable, resin can be easily shaped and transformed on any given scale. “I first encountered resin upon one of my very first visits to New York. I went into a shop to buy pencils and saw a pot made with resin, which I quickly understood was the material for new ideas, because it’s a liquid that becomes solid. You can use resin in an open way, with a rigid or elastic mold, and you can do a lot of different things with it.” A wide array of editioned tables, chairs, cabinets, bookshelves, light fixtures and two-dimensional works were made that way over the years in the studio. The flexibility of the medium also allows for a certain degree of unicity in the resulting pieces, all original in execution, and aligned with the artist’s opposition to mass-industrial production and commercial distribution.

A simple walk through the “My Dear Mountains” exhibition reflects the range of Pesce’s experimentations with materials which, in addition to resin, also include papier-mâché, foam and felt. His predilection for discovering new materials and techniques almost comes out of sheer necessity. It is the manifestation of a strong belief that the artist has the responsibility to evolve with the times. “Today, the reality is changing and you cannot always be the same in expression. You change because the times change.” Perhaps the purest expression of this sentiment is a recent project, “The Time Train” (2019), an art installation consisting of a train in plywood and resin emitting smoke made with the newly-used cotton fiber. The metaphor here is again rather simple, in that the train fuels off of the energy of people getting on and off the train in the same way society reinvents itself with new generations. 

But experiments with materials don’t always get to the production stage. Mr. Pesce recently considered using a type of elastic ceramic used by space engineers on missile domes, which would have reaffirmed his commitment to the notion of plastic malleability. It was however so incredibly expensive that it was never used. Two or three years ago, he and his team discovered an extremely fragile and light foam which, as original and appealing as it was, could not be used for anything concrete. The search continues and with it, the curiosity and appetite for the ideas that come with new modes of production. 

Formalistic experimentation constitutes one of the central pillars of Pesce’s work, as the physical manifestation of his embrace of change and nonconformity – whether it concerns the artwork itself or the products that are associated with it. One of the central ideas behind his current touring exhibition in China, “Nobody’s Perfect,” (on view in Shenzhen, Beijing, and now in Shanghai through October 16) was to reaffirm the importance of the individual and human rights in a society where those principles often get overlooked. That is evidenced perhaps most strikingly in the design of the three-volume print catalogue, shaped like the cutout of a Chinese woman’s profile. “In 3,000 years, China has never seen a book that isn’t square or rectangular,” he says with a laugh. “For us, a person is so important that they deserve to physically represent the cover of a catalogue.” Let’s also not forget to mention Mr. Pesce’s most recent contribution to the world of fashion through the much-talked-about set that he designed especially for the Bottega Venetta fashion show in Milan last month – a colorful poured resin floor and 400 unique chairs. 

There is consistency in Mr. Pesce’s embrace of inconsistence. In such instable times, Mr. Pesce’s design philosophy is a welcome antidote to the gloominess of a generation struck by a cascade of unforeseen crises. Over the decades, he has always championed change and impertinence, and developed an optimistic and forward-thinking outlook on objects and the built environment that permeates his production. The result is a body of work – whether afunctional or utilitarian – that visually rejects the traditional notions of internationalist monotony (“depressing because it is authoritarian,” in his own words) through a bold use of color, material elasticity and ever-changing interpretations of kitsch and maximalism. 

“Now is our moment, and I think it’s a very vital moment. If we follow our times as it is our duty, we cannot be coherent, and we cannot always be the same. When you discover something that is the opposite of what you discovered yesterday, you follow a contradiction, and that’s ok. It’s life.” The architecture and design of the future need to embrace the never-ending self-questioning, curiosity and adaptability that the work of Mr. Pesce so vigorously embodies, making it more vital and relevant than ever in our times of change. 

Opening image: Gaetano Pesce in his Studio in Navy Yard, Brooklyn. Photo Josh Itiola