Gaetano PESCE (1939 - 2024)

Born in 1939 in La Spezia, Gaetano Pesce developed, from the early 1960s onward, a radical position that clearly set him apart from his contemporaries. While much postwar Italian design pursued industrial perfection and serial uniformity, Pesce embraced imperfection as a core design principle. For him, an object identical to another is meaningless, as it denies the individuality of its user. His use of resin is not merely material-driven but fundamentally conceptual. Resin allows him to introduce time, chance, and transformation into the finished object. Drips, air bubbles, chromatic shifts, and structural irregularities are never flaws but visible records of the making process, fully integrated into the formal language. Each piece becomes a permanent prototype rather than a fixed model. Pesce is also among the few designers of his generation to explicitly connect design with political and social discourse. His furniture and architectural projects act as reflections on the human condition, bodily vulnerability, social violence, and inequality, without resorting to illustration or symbolism. Function remains present, but always placed in tension with meaning. This long-marginal position helps explain why his work now occupies a space between museum collections and the collectible design market. In Pesce's practice, the object is neither decorative nor neutral. It is deliberately unstable, expressive, and designed to change through use and time.