Opening with cocktail: April 12 - from 6 pm – 10 pm

For Design Week 2011, Paola Colombari re-proposes the theme “Steel Effect”, from an exhibition in her Milanese gallery twenty years ago. This time the exhibition is dedicated to the exploration of the material steel through cabinets, tables, and chairs by the designers Karim Rashid, David Palterer, Luca Sacchetti, Antonio Cagianelli, Marjan Van Aubel, and Pawel Grunert, as well as a work of art by the artist duo Blue and Joy.

In revisiting this theme, the show plays with the word “steel”, which in its own etymology resists any indulgences: it derives from the Latin “acies” which means “sharp line, point” – and it seems as if the origin of the word in fact lingers in the material and object which it inhabits. It is common to say that steel is robust, resistant, tenacious, insensitive, hard; and these characteristics are precisely those which are often extended to man’s body and soul.

It is therefore with admiration that we think of the artist who employs this material, which seems to be frozen and which requires an incredibly intense effort in order to bring out the “form” from the rigidity of the mold and the cold.

It is not surprising then if, upon visiting the show, we dicover that the artists play with materials which create the “Steel Effect”, as is the case with the beautiful Blobulous Chair in chrome and orange fabric by Karim Rashid, the silver and wood table by David Palterer, the coffee table with steel baskets by Antonio Cagianelli for Alessi, the innovative materials such as porous foam and porcelain mixed with the color of steel by Marjan van Aubel (young Dutch designer from the Royal College of London). Their challenge lies in confronting a material which provocatively defies the concept of art itself. And the result is that improbable signs of plasticity and energy in the material of steel are now revealed and become evident in the play of transformations through effect and form which redesign sensorial games with diverse materials.

“In this exhibition, the designers invite the spectator to gamble: to allow ourselves to be carried away by the multiple correspondences which the works suggest. A game in which steel either is present and wants to be “other” or is not present but is regardless recalled by other materials which negate themselves. The forms reveal “steel” and “steel” generates simulations, illusions, disguises. Like a child who looks inside a caleidoscope, in this show we see a multiplicity of pure effects emerging from a material which, when lightweight, continuously transforms itself. We have participated in the game and have discovered that in the end there is certainly the “steel effect”, but also the effect of steel.” (Liborio Termine 1989)