Rossella Colombari, Paola Colombari, Gillo Dorfles, David Palterer, Ambrogio Allemandi (edited by Idea Books)

The book Carlo Mollino Catalogo dei Mobili- Furniture Catalogue (Idea Books 2005) is the first furniture catalogue which stems from a close study of the market and from Rossella and Paola Colombari’s extensive experience from 1981 to the present regarding the body of work of the infamous Architect Carlo Mollino. The book presents the curatorship and selection by Rossella Colombari and an essay by Paola Colombari relating their experience with Mollino, as well as a prestigious introduction by the notorious critic Gillo Dorfles, a text by the architect David Palterer and a text by the cabinet-maker Ambrogio Allemandi.

Preface GILLO DORFLES The Stylistic autonomy of Carlo Mollino
Text by DAVID PALTERER Festina Lente
Text by PAOLA COLOMBARI Le Fantome by Carlo Mollino
Text by AMBROGIO ALLEMANDI Testimony of Ambrogio Allemandi Cabinetmaker and Restorer

To order the book, please contact www.ideabooks.com

EXCERPT FROM BOOK:
“LE FANTOME BY CARLO MOLLINO, FRAGMENTS OF A TRUE STORY"
BY PAOLA COLOMBARI
copyright Paola Colombari - Idea Books 2005)

I think that I shall talk to you at length, if you care to listen to me, about forms both living and dead, of thinking by schemes or in terms of reality. I believe that all the strength of my things lies here.
-- Carlo Mollino, letter dated 13 May 1948, Rivoli, Archivio Galleria Colombari.

The day Carlo was born, his austere and wealthy father, engineer Eugenio Mollino, designer of some important areas and buildings in Turin, was in the process of designing the municipal slaughterhouse of Rivoli. It was 6 May 1905. His father Eugenio, born in Genoa to a family with roots in Voghera, was married to Iolanda Testa, daughter of a famous general, Michele Testa, whose family traced its origins to the Pavia area of Lombardy. Carlo Mollino would resemble his father in his authentic, obsessive dedication to design, characterised by architecture for large, centralised settings, cultural eclecticism and a love for honesty, summed up in his own words as “belonging with uprightness to architecture.” Beginning in childhood, Carlo Mollino was immersed in a difficult love-hate relation with his father, marked by conflict and accompanied by a need to constantly overcome a sense of paternal lack of confidence in him. This engendered terrible feelings of guilt and affliction that would accompany him for the rest of his life. It was just these punitive aspects associated with his father that would instil in young Mollino an abiding vital impulse to find a means of expression all his own, always evident in his works.

If I am mediumistic or romantic, a Stakhanovite or Hellenistic or astral, it may be a matter that has to do with a preliminary abstract characterisation, or some like or dislike involving my world, or a perfectly legitimate moral issue or a question of mores - but that has nothing in common with the correctness of my architecture, or anyone else’s.
-- Carlo Mollino, “Disegno una casa sull’altura,” Stile, 40, 1944).

His father’s library and archives shaped young Mollino in cultural terms. He frequently was to be found in the quiet of the study of the villa located in Rivoli near Turin. There he would immerse himself in adventure stories, catalogues, technical manuals and periodicals of various kinds. The youthful tastes of Carlo Mollino included not just Conrad, I viaggi straordinari by Saturnino Farandola and the illustrated travel journal published by Sonzogno in 1919, but also such various reading matter as postcards, title pages and musical scores that became visual fetishes for him. The great critic Albino Galvano would call them “stimulating suggestions,” and there is no doubt that they left Mollino with oneiric scraps of memories. Mollino’s syncretic languages would frequently reappear in the decor of his surrealist furnishings, such as in various homes, including the celebrated Casa Devalle (1939), Casa Miller (1937), Casa Minola (1944) and Casa Orengo (also known as the “Casa verso la collina,” 1949), as well as in Mollino’s own last home and study on Via Napione and the Lutrario ballroom (1959). Rococo, late eclecticism and the Italian Liberty style influenced his early training, while dilettantism imbued his caricatures with an ironic flavour.

The search for a language somewhere between Dadaism, Surrealism and late Futurism gave Mollino a variety of cultural references cultivated as part of his friendship with certain important Turin artists, among them the painter Martina, Felice Casorati, Fillia, Enrico Prampolini, Mino Rosso, Tullio di Albissola, Diulgheroff and Italo Cremona.

The ever so rational details of his designs, and his unexpected free falls in terms of form lend his architectural works a constructive restraint full of pathos. An example of this is the lovely architecture of the racetrack in Turin (Centro Ippico Torinese), designed in 1937, and destroyed one tragic night on the orders of the municipal authorities (to be replaced by a nursery school), despite a petition to the contrary signed by many intellectuals, including Bruno Zevi. LA FEMME SELON L’OPTIQUE SURREALISTE represents the extreme limit of form, which provided Mollino with a pleasurable aesthetic force that would remain with him until death: “woman” as muse, her forms dynamic, ethereal signs; her body an idolised fetish. So it is that his furniture and furnishings attempt to evoke and capture, even for just a moment, these persuasive forces. This is evident, for example, in his famous “Arabeschi Totali” (Total Arabesques), small tables of heat-curved wood, or the table in the shape of a dinosaur for the Lattes publishing house.

Everything moves on the scene in “Vita di Oberon” (Life of Oberon) and, like a magician, Mollino, creates futuristic collages of memories where everything is in swirling motion like at the circus.

In this metamorphic scenography, the “portrait in a setting” becomes image and photography. Mollino documented his life’s work with extraordinary photographs. His erotic photography, as “portraits in a setting,” bear comparison with Man Ray’s nudes, the photographs of France’s Pierre Molinier and the Japanese-inspired work by George Huguet (1906-1974).

Mollino’s most famous and rare photographs are the Polaroid shots dating from the 1960s. In them, the nude becomes sensual eroticism, while others take their inspiration from Dadaist motifs. The female takes a leading role in his “portraits in a setting,” which are as dreamlike and surreal as a fetish, “sculptural and cinematographic.” “Figurative Minima” was Mollino’s definition for his creative evolution, a continuous narration, a thin thread linking fragments of popular memory and adolescent memories. Mollino’s surrealism thus takes shape in the constant surfacing of his personal heritage made up of sensations, emotions and remnants of past culture joined with popular objects, all for the purpose of creating a sort of “fatal ecstasy” in a unitary process where anything may materialise.

“The taste for figurative elements” is embodied in an variety of objects that assume a narrative function, such as jambs, capitals, plaster hands, mirrors, curtains, quilting; and also pure colours, such as white, silver, violet, malachite green, ruby red, and mustard.

THE APPEARANCE OF LE FANTOME In 1981 no one spoke anymore about Carlo Mollino, or still remembered “Carluccio,” as mother Iolanda and father Eugenio used to affectionately call him. After he drew his last breath on the afternoon of 27 August 1973, much time would elapse when nothing remained in memory of a refined and eclectic soul.

It not until the year 1981 when a friend dropped in at the first Galleria Colombari in the heart of Turin to offer a strange piece of furniture with a curious shape. It was a long white maple servant with the torpedo-like form of an old racing car. The stylised supporting structure took the shape of a stay, while the upper portion formed a large complimentary frame.

The fascinating and mysterious object was placed in the middle of the gallery, as an objet trouvè full of energy, but unfortunately nothing was known about the author. For a time, no one was able to provide information about the bizarre purchase, even though the perception was clear that some vital force was inside that piece of furniture. Three months later the suggestion was made that the piece might be the work of a certain Carlo Mollino.

Shortly thereafter, the phone rang at the Galleria: it was the owner of a major art gallery, announcing in heavily-accented Italian that he had learned about the new Galleria, and that he was “crazy with excitement” over the works of architect Carlo Mollino, adding that he was enamoured of the furniture to the point of wanting to own a piece.

Le fantome of Mollino had reappeared. The hunt was on. Where could Mollino’s treasure be hidden?

It was found on the premises of the Lattes publishing house after a long and difficult search. There it was, squirreled away in a deposit full of old abandoned furniture on the outskirts of Turin, in the old Lattes building in Collegno. When the right basement door was opened, the immense treasure appeared as if by magic: tables in anthropomorphic shapes, small tables in the form of arabesques, chairs with verve, whose profiles were sharp or shaped like a backbone. Practically all of it was there, in a state of dusty abandon.
© Paola Colombari - Idea Books 2005

PAOLA AND ROSSELLA COLOMBARI –

Paola and Rossella Colombari, born into a well-established family of antique dealers, opened their first establishment ­ the “Galleria” - in 1981 in Turin. With a special interest in the twentieth century, the sisters participated in the birth and development of Modern Antique Collecting, dedicating particular attention to the study and valorisation of works by Carlo Mollino. In 1981, they staged the first show dedicated to Mollino following his demise in August 1973. It was held at “Trussoni Mobili.” Idea Books was the first publishing house to bring out a monograph on Carlo Mollino, edited by Professor Giovanni Brino.

In 1983, the Colombari sisters took part in the Biennale Des Antiquaires in Monte Carlo, where they exhibited the extraordinary table owned by the Lattes publishing house.

In 1985, together with the Semenzato auction house, they staged the first international auction of modern antiques ever held. Among the items up for auction were the lovely furnishings of Casa Orengo, the house sometimes affectionately referred to as “La Casa Verso la Collina.” It was on this occasion that the high market value of Mollino’s work was incontrovertibly established. In that same year, at the Triennale of Milan they staged another important auction entitled “Le affinità elettive” (Elective Affinities), with one-of-a-kind pieces by Sottsass, Mendini and Branzi. In 1989, on the occasion of the opening of their new Milan establishment, they staged a show with the title “Effetto Acciaio” (Steel Effect), inviting sixteen international designers to produce unique pieces for the Galleria. Rossella Colombari also dedicated important shows to Italian architects, including Mendini and Branzi.

In December 1990, in collaboration with the Galleria Sozzani of Milan, they gathered some 100 pieces for an extraordinary show dedicated to Carlo Mollino. The Sozzani publishing house was responsible for the catalogue, printing 1000 numbered copies.

In 1994, a major show was held in the Museum of Darmstadt, under the direction of Renate Ulmer. Archivolto publishing house was responsible for the catalogue, “Carlo Mollino, Chairs and Furnishings.”

In parallel with the activity aimed at valorising the furniture, the Colombari sisters collaborated in the staging of photography shows of Mollino’s work, including at the Robert Miller Gallery of New York, as well as in Paris and Rome. In 2000, at the Cultural Institute of Paris, the two women were responsible for the show entitled “The Work of Carlo Mollino, 1930-1960.” The show afterwards moved on to the Cultural Institute of Amsterdam.

In 2001, Rossella Colombari inaugurated her new offices at 10 Via Maroncelli with a major show dedicated to Bob Wilson, “Chair and Chairs,” followed by Carla Tolomeo.

That same year, an auction dedicated to Carlo Mollino was held at the prestigious London offices of Christie’s, including a part the vast collection owned by the Galleria Colombari.

At present, Rossella also teaches at the Domus Academy and concerns herself with important furnishings.

In 1985, Paola Colombari founded “Edizioni Galleria Colombari,” involving the production of furniture in limited numbers, bearing the signatures of important designers, such as Antonio Cagianelli, Riccardo Dalisi and Garouste & Bonetti.

In collaboration with architect David Palterer, she created a Murano glass collection, “Riflessioni” (Reflections), that was exhibited at the Musee Des Decoratif of Montreal in 1990, the Ghent and Ostend Museum in Belgium in 1992, the Clara Scremini Gallery in Paris, the Current Gallery of Seattle and the museum of the Warsaw castle in 1998.