Piero Fornasetti

Piero Fornasetti

Piero Fornasetti lived and worked in Milan from 1935, when he was only twenty-two, until his death in 1988. During this long career he established an enduring reputation as a designer with a style that was all his own -- a style based on illusionism, architectural perspectives, and a host of personal leitmotifs, such as the sun, playing cards, fish and flowers, from which he spun seemingly endless variations.

Fornasetti applied his decorative vocabulary to an astonishing array of objects -- "fashion items", as he put it, "which never go out of fashion". Hats, waistcoats, pipes, ashtrays, chairs, plates, cabinets, pianos, shops, cars, ocean liners -- all were transformed by the application of unexpected images. A Corinthian capital is literally pressed into service as a chair back; a La Scala program cover decorates a scarf; a girl's Lace, split down the middle, adorns a plate. "He makes objects speak", said Gio Ponti, his friend and longtime collaborator. Fornasetti worked in almost every medium -- drawings, graphics, architecture, trompe l'oeil, themes and variations, nature.

The Post-Modernist reappraisal of design has left Fornasetti's oeuvre more contemporary and popular than ever. Designers and collectors today celebrate his use of allusion, unsettling images, and striking juxtaposition to create unique, whimsical objects. Fornasetti's masterpieces shock, delight and inspire.

(c)1995 Graphique de France