MOLTENI CELEBRATES ITS 80TH ANNIVERSARY AND PRESENTS THE AMERICAN PREMIERE OF “AMARE GIO PONTI,”

Pubblicato il 24 Novembre 2015 Di

Molteni is celebrating 80 years’ history at Design Miami/Art Basel (December 2 – 6, 2015) with an original project: the first documentary film about one of the unforgotten fathers of Italian design. Recently previewed at the Milano Design Film Festival, the film is a portrait of Gio Ponti’s life and career as architect, aspiring painter, promoter ante litteram of Italian design. With a career spanning more than fifty years, Ponti experimented tirelessly with everything in design – arts, crafts, objects, architecture and materials – from the small to the large and ranging from designing a handle to creating a town planning scheme. “Architecture is an interpretation of life,” wrote Ponti, a popularizer of everything modern who ran the risk of indifference and oblivion. The film explores the reasons for this distrust, especially on the part of the critics, above and beyond the stereotypes and clichés that “soon relegated him to the seraphic Olympus of the unacknowledged fathers,” as Fulvio Irace wrote. It also tries to explain the reasons for the change in fortune that has recently seen Ponti rediscovered and reproposed, as a model of the European and international architect. To paraphrase the man himself when he wrote that “art has fallen in love with industry,” why has yesterday’s and today’s industry fallen in love with Gio Ponti?

According to Gene Pampaloni, “Ponti deliberately chose to offer the public the Greek of modern art through one of his Vulgates, brought into the homes, the living rooms, onto the tables, shelves, between the sideboards and second-sideboards, where people smoked their Macedonia cigars after lunch with gold paper cigar holders. These beautiful objects are also a message, just like the pages of Domus or the Montecatini building, to the new ruling classes.” The film is based on the search for historical material, iconographic sources, such as the Ponti Archives and Teche Rai, and an interview with Gio Ponti in his studio in via Dezza, his architectural designs and customized furniture, ranging from Villa Planchart to Palazzo Montecatini, right through to the Pirelli skyscraper. With architectural projects where design reigned supreme, Ponti designed everything from the buildings themselves to the interior furnishings and details of the fittings. “Amare Gio Ponti” is the first documentary about the great maestro with testimony from his heirs – his children Lisa, Letizia and Giulio, and his grandsons Salvatore Licitra and Paolo Rosselli – as well as interviews with some of today’s prominent figures: Vittorio Gregotti, Fulvio Irace, Enzo Mari, Giovanna and Maria Grazia Mazzocchi,S andro Mendini, Nanda Vigo, Bob Wilson.  Also featured in the film is an exclusive interview with the publisher, Benedikt Taschen, a great Ponti fan and collector. The film is curated by Francesca Molteni and produced by Muse, in partnership with the Gio Ponti Archives, promoted by Molteni&C, which has been producing remakes from the Ponti Collection since 2012, a project that has led to the rediscovery of certain items of furniture designed by the great maestro and never produced on an industrial scale, such as the small wooden D.552.2 table with a glass top, designed for the American company M. Singer&Sons in the 1950s, and the D.154.2 armchair, which Ponti made for the Villa Planchart in Caracas in 1954, presented at the latest Salone del Mobile furniture fair in Milan.

On the occasion of Design Miami/Art Basel the D.154.2 Armchair and the D.555.1 Small Table designed by Gio Ponti are also among the key features of the project promoted by Federlegno Arredo Eventi, ICE and the Italian Ministry for Economic Development, Salone del Mobile.Milano meets Miami (December 1 – 6, 2015) at the PAMM – Perez Art Museum – designed by Herzog & de Meuron.