garage BENTIVOGLIO

In Grace and Leo's Brooklyn apartment (Will and Grace, S6 Ep 02 'Last Ex To Brooklyn) a dozen plates with Lina Cavalieri's face fill a corner of the living room. The assimilation of Fornasetti into America as a purely artistic object underlines the change in meaning that the objects that the Milanese company has been producing for over eighty years have undergone over time. If you cross the rooms of Palazzo Bentivoglio, scattered over furniture and tables, sometimes even in the drawers, you can find trays, ashtrays, boxes,... which represent a moment of pause between the works that, in the strict sense, make up the art collection. Piero Fornasetti's great intuition, from the beginning, was in fact to create “things that are among things”, almost without a utilitarian purpose, that would imitate the objects and liturgies of a bourgeois house. \nLike Piranesi two centuries earlier, Fornasetti collects figures, fragments, details over the course of his life, and assembles them into new pastiches: for him, collecting means immediately recomposing, re-delivering that stolen heritage to everyone, re-bringing the world back to the world. The uniqueness of his gaze, the ability to organically bring together the chaos of all those fractured images, is opposed by the recovery of iconographic identity patterns and models of a bourgeois world that is irretrievably coming to an end and that can only ironize about now lost uses and customs. \nLong before Tumblr and Pinterest, Fornasetti collected the things most contemporary to him, namely images, and transforms them into merchandise; old models are transformed into new figures, often replicated in numerous variations, and what has already been seen becomes news. There is no object or shape that cannot be covered by its textures, with the same pervasive and almost infesting mode that will be adopted years later by Ettore Sottsass in his fruitful collaboration with Abet Laminati. In fact, one is not a number and, in the midst of the Fordist revolution, Fornasetti produces artisanal but serial objects, which want to enter into dialogue or with each other, in the exhibition of the numerous variants, or even better with all the other elements, works, furnishings, with which they are surrounded. His almost archaeological method thus becomes a possible paradigm with which to question and interpret our world: what has been can be seen once again and be fully experienced again.