Elena Salmistraro is a designer we know from her rich array of collaborations and awards, as well as from a long relationship with Domus. Also, Elena Salmistraro’s latest presentation is a family of monsters.
Can the two statements coexist? Not only can they, they do even more: monsters are crucial in the genesis of Salmistraro’s expression, and an exhibition in Milan is going to reveal it.

“Alchimie nel vuoto” is the first solo exhibition where the designer makes room for her nature as a painter, it is curated by Silvana Annicchiarico and will inhabit the spaces of Antonio Colombo Arte Contemporanea gallery until 8 February 2025. With the drawings and paintings on show, Salmistraro explores “a visual universe populated by imaginative bestiaries and anthropomorphic jungles” said the curator, “where the ordinary becomes extraordinary, and all boundaries dissolve in poetics that oscillate between neo-primitivism, magic realism, the playful and the surreal”.

Paintings, therefore, and prints, as well as totems and vases manufactured by Bosa Ceramiche then handpainted by the artist, a large tapestry produced by TaiPing, and a wooden sculpture produced by Scapin representing the Melma monster, Salmistraro’s daughter’s favourite: because the autobiographical element is in fact everything in this exhibition, and the designer developed it with the curator as if in a psychological session, she told us.

“I was a very shy, fearful child, and I was always at home drawing”, Salmistraro says, “as I was quite lonely; I also loved horror films, but my parents wouldn’t let me watch them. I would see small clips of them, then I would keep imagining monsters, then draw and redraw them, until I slowly gave them a friendly look. Today, when I draw on the telephone, but also when I draw furniture, I start from these somewhat monstrous figures: I really understood what my stylistic signature was”.

Silvana Annicchiarico, curator

At a time when maximalism is returning in many positions within the design discourse, Salmistraro’s maximalism is rather stemming “from self-consciousness” than from ideology; a horror vacui not feared but assimilated, which has become the value on which she bases and claims her difference, even in a production-related practice such as design: “When my first small serial productions started to appear, I always thought of adding something more because I like the idea that my objects entering people’s homes can tell something about me. There is always a story behind it, which is not forced”, a storytelling that comes at the beginning of the whole process, and not at the end with the sole purpose of telling about an object that has already been produced.