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Ernest Hemingway said that "there can only be two places where we can live happily: at home and in Paris. You may or may not agree, but from October 19 to May 5 there is one more reason to feel almost at home in Paris. In fact, the city pays homage to Italian design with the exhibition "Tutto Ponti, Gio Ponti archi-designer", the first retrospective dedicated to the great Italian master in France.
Curated by Olivier Gabet, Dominique Forest, Sophie Bouilhet-Dumas and Salvatore Licitra and realized in collaboration with the Gio Ponti Archive, the exhibition presents more than 400 objects, or projects, designed by the great Italian genius. The exhibition is hosted by the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, a place not always at the top of the Parisian wish list, but worth a visit even if only for its prestigious location in the west wing of the Louvre Museum, Pavillon de Marsan at 107 rue de Rivoli, or for the characteristic period rooms or "period rooms" of its permanent collection.
Walking through the rooms of the exhibition, the definition that the architect Ernesto Nathan Rogers (1909-1969) had given of Ponti immediately comes to mind: the only mind capable of drawing "from the spoon to the city". It doesn't matter if it was a chair, a cup or the house in Via Randaccio 9 in Milan - a small Palladian monument that was the first of the houses he designed and inhabited - his genius was precisely that of introducing strongly innovative elements without ever changing the classical forms.
Fascinated by his taste for the ancient and the oriental culture, Ponti was in fact one of the most influential artists of the 20th century.
In reality it is not a real debut on the French scene for Ponti, who as artistic director of the Ginori manufactory in 1925 had participated with his porcelain at the Universal Exhibition in Paris winning the Grand Prix. On the side of the Rue de Rivoli of the exhibition, the curators have designed environments to remember each decade of the great Italian designer. Following their inspiration, we like to remember the years from 1923 to 1933, those of the collaboration with Ginori.
The Richard-Ginori Museum in Sesto Fiorentino, recently purchased by the Italian State and saved from a ruinous decline, offers precious examples of the artistic revolution brought by Gio Ponti in the field of decorative arts. It would be nice to imagine an exhibition of the reopening of the museum dedicated to the countless colloborations of this company with Italian designers. We will come back to write about it... stay tuned.
In the meantime we are proud to present some pieces by Gio Ponti produced by the Ginori factory in San Cristoforo in Milan and we like to think that even without going to Paris we can bring some of the Italian genius into our homes and thus pay homage to this great Italian master.
