We define him and will always define him as Italian, for his Venetian upbringing and for the chapters of political and artistic history he has shared in his career: Gaetano Pesce was also for a long time a citizen of the world, with a certain inclination towards New York, where he moved in 1983 and where he died on April 4.

His earthly career was a series of subversive, or at least critical, acts towards the system in which he lived or worked: from the expandable forms of the Up 5 armchair, which in the mid-1960s evoked those of primordial goddesses and sparked the debate on the female condition, to the chairs for Bottega Veneta, capable of defining the visual paradigm of a season of contemporary fashion, to his provocative inhabited bridge designed for the Strait of Messina. From his work as a designer for C&B (Cassina and Busnelli, the future B&B Italia) to his participation in the landmark MoMA exhibition "Italy: The New Domestic Landscape" to that of an independent creative, Pesce has always sought to challenge the typological assumptions on which projects are based. Just think of the façade of the Organic Building in Osaka, a pattern of large and sculptural fiberglass pockets filled with green plants, which in the early '90s anticipated an entire chapter of architecture characterized by vertical greenery, or the resin of the Fish design vases, seemingly statuesque and actually elastic. On the other hand, as he told Domus in 2022: "If you discover something that is the opposite of what you discovered yesterday, you are following a contradiction, and that's okay. That's life."

Opening image: photo Gabriele Zanon. Courtesy Salone del Mobile.Milano 2019