The Daily Telegraph - Saturday
Gaetano Pesce
Radical industrial designer behind cheeky Sixties conceits like the voluptuous ‘La Mamma’ chair
GAETANO PESCE, who has died aged 84, was a flamboyant furniture designer and architect who rejected the machine-tooled perfection of International Modernism and embraced instead the happy accident, in candycoloured gloops of resin and foam.
Inspired by Pop Art, he was not afraid to make objects that looked like recognisable things, such as an ashtray in the shape of Christ’s crucified hand (cigarettes to be stubbed out in the bloody stigma), or an oversized Anglepoise-style lamp, named “Moloch”, after the Old Testament god who demands human sacrifice. “With abstraction we cannot communicate. If I see something abstract, I can say I like it or that I don’t, and nothing more,” he told his biographer, Glenn Adamson.
He saw his duty as bearing witness to his times, and industrial design as a way to get his subversive ideas into thousands of homes. His most famous work, Up 5 (1969), nicknamed “La Mamma”, was a scarlet foam chair that arrived pancake-flat in a vacuum pack, but once opened, magically inflated into a voluptuous female form, somewhere between Brigitte Bardot and the Venus of Willendorf. Attached by a lead was a spherical foam ottoman (Up 6), which signified a prisoner’s “ball and chain”.
Gaetano intended it as a feminist protest. Later, however, he was criticised by second-wave feminists for trading off female sex appeal. (The manufacturer’s adverts showcased the chair alongside sexy women in silver jumpsuits, and in
Diamonds Are Forever Bond girl Lola Larson drapes herself enticingly over it.) Others saw the chair and ottoman as mother and baby, connected by an umbilical cord. Pesce thought this dissent was “fantastic”.
Pesce was both fervently serious about his own work and seemingly immune to any pressure to be “grown-up” or “chic”. He communicated big ideas with a childlike directness. His Golgotha table, for instance, dared to depict Christ’s tomb, with bloodred resin seeping out of the bricks, surrounded by chairs made from crumpled, resin-impregnated linen, representing the Shroud of Turin. He was not above putting smiley faces on chairs to cheer people up.
He liked provocation, because it “touches the stomach and then goes up to the brain”. Anti-authoritarian to his bones, he left Italy in 1968 for Paris because he objected to the art scene’s stifling adherence to communism. He had visited the Soviet Union as a teenager, and found it “hell”. He viewed the concrete-and-glass architecture of the International Style as a form of communism, riding roughshod over the differences between people.
His ideology was to celebrate difference. In furniture, this might mean experimenting with foam so that he could fill a chair mould and each time it would come out slightly different (his Sit Down series, 1975-80). In architecture, it meant designing an eclectic apartment block in Brazil, with each floor a different colour and shape.
He was described as “imperial in his bearing and imperious in his pronouncements”, but his wacky visions turned out to be prescient. In 1989-93, in Osaka, he built an “organic” office block, its exterior a vertical garden, its interiors a radiant, colourful resin, like boiled sweets.
In 1994, in New York, he pioneered the office space of the future for an advertising company, with a colourful, open-plan, communal fantasyland in which workers had no desks, but wheeled their computers around, or napped on sofas. This was all too much for 1994 – one employee compared it to “working inside a migraine” – but today his ideas are mainstream.
Pesce reinvented himself obsessively, a principle he had enshrined aged 18 as “incoherence”, out of fear of repeating himself. “I like to make things that people can’t tell are by me.” When he was asked to lecture in Paris on postmodernism, he alarmed his audience by turning up in a gas mask, claiming that the backward-looking postmodernism was “poison”.
He was born in the port of La Spezia, Italy, on November 8 1939. His Florentine father, a naval officer, died at sea soon afterwards, and Gaetano grew up near Venice. The dominant force in his life was his mother, a pianist from Este, who briefly sent him to an all-girls convent school. He later expressed the view that women should be masters of the universe.
Pesce studied architecture at the University of Venice, but took his education into his own hands, visiting chemical factories to see new materials, and was enchanted by dough-like polyurethane foam. His dream of building a foam house, however, took half a century to realise.
He was converted to industrial design in the early 1960s by Milena Vettore, whom he met while hiding from the ticket collector in the baggage rack of a train. They formed an intense romantic and artistic union, which was abruptly ended when she died aged 27, in 1967, of a brain haemorrhage, which he blamed on the strong ultrasound of the machines they were using. (Despite this, he remained stubbornly laissez-faire about his toxic – and, if mishandled, explosive – materials, never wearing protective kit.)
He flew to Saigon during the Vietnam
War and was imprisoned in the 1968 Paris riots. By the age of 30, he had had a one-man show at MoMa in New York, and shut down the Louvre when his exhibition there leaked putrid meat juice. In 1980, after his mother’s death, he moved from Paris to New York.
In 2019, his bestselling “La Mamma” chair was reissued to mark its 50th anniversary, and in 2022 he collaborated with Glenn Adamson on a biographical survey, Gaetano
Pesce: The Complete Incoherence.
In 2016, the British sculptor Anthea Hamilton made the Turner Prize shortlist for a a gigantic pair of male buttocks, being parted by two hands, based on an unrealised proposal by Pesce for an apartment-block doorway in Milan. His other unbuilt designs included an S-shaped bridge to connect Sicily to the Italian mainland.
Gaetano Pesce had a son and daughter, nicknamed Tato and Tata, with Francesca Lucco, who predeceased him in 1997, and a daughter from another relationship.
Gaetano Pesce, born November 8 1939, died April 3 2024