Wandering the rooms at the Ragghianti Foundation rediscovering 120 works chosen by Isa Tutino, Antonia Jannone and Maturo Lovi, you are struck by a feeling of both curiosity and amazement - which is quickly replaced by a sense of inadequacy. Finding so many everyday objects (or, more accurately, works), the product of the last thirty years of Italian design, brought together in one place, and admiring the mould-breaking creativeness and evocative power that they display, helps us to pay tribute to an undoubtedly fertile period, but also makes us see the current decade in a less favourable light.
If the current panorama of straightforward design for the home is so often characterised by a homogenisation that makes us confuse its products together (the result of globalisation and the economic crisis perhaps?), pieces that are the result of a cross-contamination between art and design often sink into simple provocation, making us nostalgic for that illustrious work has been brought together in such quantity for the exhibition in Lucca.
The effort that the curators have put into the selection and research has allowed them to identify and incorporate a sense of chronological development and evolution into the exhibition: you start with Antidesign and early-1970s Pop Art, before moving onto the poetic system of objects, the products of the work of the Alchymia and Memphis studios, the art furniture of the 1980s and the "poetry of fragment" of the 1990s. Completing the displays is a section curated by Mauro Lovi, "La Collezione Megalopoli", which brings together the distinctive work created around the Megalopoli workshop-gallery.
The exhibition also has the merit of making you think about what it is that makes a work of art or design, and about the (changing) boundaries that run across this. Although, on the whole, we have to agree with Ettore Sottsass's dictum that "art is grasping lightning in the hand and holding it tight…while design is a profession that is more or less rational, or can be rationalised," it is undoubtedly true that for many of the objects on display here their designers too succeeded in grasping the lightning in their hands.
Loredana Mascheroni