At the age of 83, Gaetano Pesce is enjoying the late fame of his career. As the artist, designer, and architect told me by the pool at the Ritz Hotel in Miami Beach on a recent wet afternoon, “When I got here three days ago, someone stopped me. on the street and recognize me!”
Pesce, who has lived and worked in Brooklyn since 1983, was in town during Art Basel week to present a series of chairs he designed for Bottega Veneta’s Spring-Summer 2023 show, held in St. Milan in September. While responsible for much of the surrealist, collectible piece of furniture is spectacular, such as the buxom “La Mamma,” an armchair that is sometimes controversial. Arguing in the abstract form of a woman held up by a ball and a chain, Pesce is as surprised as anything he becomes one of the trendiest name in the world of fashion and novelty design. (As I wrote last week on GQ’s Show bulletin Notes, Art Base has emerged as a fashion week Thursday, making it a welcome setting for a design professional like Pesce.) “Me, I’m not very good,” he says. “The good thing is that other people don’t do what they have to do. So the little things I do become very important.”
Courtesy of Bottega Veneta
Despite his elderly statesman status in a town awash with rising stars in his mid-20s, Pesce retained all of his youthful enthusiasm: in the mid-60s he wrote a statement language against the similarity in architecture and design. When I asked him if he saw anything interesting that week at the art fairs, he waved his hand reluctantly. “At the art show, there were a lot of decorations, a lot of maquillage. Generally very superficial. I don’t see innovation,” he said. Pesce liked Goya and Michelangelo, artists who, in his view, did what artists are supposed to do: reflect profound truths about reality. And don’t let him start with the realistic cityscape of Miami Beach. “If we look here, we see a lot of the same buildings,” he said voluntarily. “The International Style allows an architect to do the same building here, and the same building in Stockholm—the diversity of two different places requires a different construction. But the International Style is very tyrannical.”
On the other hand, with his Bottega Veneta rose, Pesce sought to capture what he considers to be one of life’s most important and noble truths: that we are all unique and That uniqueness is the strength of humanity. In other words, in Pesce’s world, we are not molded plywood Eames chairs, beautiful in our simplicity and replicability. Instead, we are like one of his own creations: organic, murky, and even a little ugly. Literally, if you ask Pesce: “In a way, the chair is the closest thing to man,” he says, explaining why the chair has captured his imagination for so many years. decade. Many of Pesce’s most famous designs emulate the human form, such as a colorful cabinet that resembles a face; For Pesce, the allure of chairs with limbs and backs was obvious.
