 The Inherent Dynamism of Marble
| A graduate in mechanical engineering, the designer Valerio Cometti founded V12 Design in Milan in 2005. Attracted by the challenges from across a range of sectors, his work as a designer aims at restoring the balance between aesthetic research, design and true innovation. He also contributes to car and product design magazines. |
|
By Valerio Cometti
Pico della Mirandola, Leonardo da Vinci, Filippo Brunelleschi...men of infinite sensitivity, extraordinary minds that have won a place in history for themselves and for this Italy, now at times rather tarnished.
For the common man to deal with minds that have managed to combine advanced scientific knowledge and authentic poetry in literary, architectural and artistic composition is a source of bewilderment and astonishment even more than of admiration.
Nowadays, especially in Italy, we are experiencing a dangerous "faux-humanist" drift, which is undermining the very foundations of the country’s competitiveness.
"Faux-humanist" because it is the result of a sterile and silently jealous snobbery that relegates scientific knowledge to the status of a boring but inevitable accessory, reserved for bespectacled nerds and stammering eggheads.
We are a nation that has lost clarity and incisiveness with the decline of the appeal of the technology, science and intellectual subjects more generally.
Marble could be taken as a symbol of the Renaissance, when art and science seemed to be fused and inseparable in an unrepeatable union of power.
Stone milling by anthro arms, water-jet cutting and laser etching sound like terms taken from the catalog of a tedious exhibition of machine tools.
In reality they are the instruments of a powerful and accurate manufacturing plant, the weapons of a project that should not remain ossified and closed, but throw itself like Pico into "a unique and powerful embrace" with both composition and the technological virtuosity that will enable and enhance its fulfillment.
The balance between technology and creativity needs to be restored today.
Without prevarication, but with genuine curiosity, the engineer, the architect, in a word the designer, has to adopt the new manufacturing technologies, the most profound and modern know-how about materials.
Technical, scientific knowledge, as an intimate confidant and benign informer of the secrets of reality, not only serves to reduce costs, not only contributes to the reduction of working times.
If the designer reasons like this, he repeats the error of superficiality and pride to which I referred above.
A robot that surpasses the virtuosity of a sculptor has to provide inspiration for a new creative path.
It should not be greeted with skepticism by those who identify their limitations in the calculated repeatability of the act of cutting.
Is photography perhaps less powerful than painting?
Is the cinema perhaps less expressive than the theater?
Marble contains forms, marble is permeated with designs, it conceals firmly anchored in its crystalline structure of calcium carbonate ideas that need a new, rich, honest and curious approach on the part of designers.
Only in this way will they overflow with freshness, originality and a new and enduring poetry.
Perhaps Marc Newson, with his marble objects for the Gagosian Gallery?
Why not?
The genesis of exquisitely prismatic, extruded forms, the product of brilliant ideas formed in the “primordial soup” of three-dimensional CADs, finds in CNC milling the instrument that ensures the full respect of parallels and offsets in the surfaces.
And perhaps we can go even further...
Beyond sculpture, beyond the simple paring away of material, perhaps beyond the function of static expression of this exceptional stone.
When I look at marble I always seem to see it looking crafty, returning my curious and timorous gaze.
It seems to be saying:
"There are still a lot of ideas in here, a lot of projects, not just forms...
What are you waiting for? Get them out!"
|
|
