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This room no longer has walls: Where Art and Technology Collide
An arcadian-like site-specific art installation in Milan – by Italian artist Francesco Simeti – has been realised with Iris Ceramica Group’s pioneering Design Your Slabs technology.
In Milan, a stunning installation brings together the beauty of the natural world and the endless applications of technology in ceramics. Deer, zebras, big cats and exotic flowers dance across the site-specific installation by Sicilian-born, New York-based multidisciplinary artist Francesco Simeti, which has been brought to life with Italian high-end natural ceramics company Iris Ceramica Group’s trailblazing Design Your Slabs (DYS) technology. This ceramic-based installation is fittingly found covering the walls of the cafeteria in the new Milan headquarters of Fondazione Officine Saffi, a not-for-profit organisation advancing contemporary ceramics by nurturing its makers, encouraging research and experimentation, and cultivating dialogue within the field.
The DYS technology can digitally print Iris Ceramica Group’s ceramic surfaces with any image or design, using a printing process that yields an ultra-high-definition finish.
Simeti’s work, Questa stanza non ha più pareti (This room no longer has walls) – a reference to a famous Italian song – crosses the boundaries of geography and time, using ceramic decorations from time periods spanning from the Etruscan era to ancient Turkey, Greece and Italy up to the modern age. Six months of research has been articulated in a collage of artworks taken from vases, plates and other surfaces that have been accurately transposed onto large ceramic slabs in full colour. The original flaws and features of those pieces have also been reproduced with Iris Ceramica Group’s DYS technology, adding to the charming historic patina of the animals, birds and insects decorating the walls and distilling the history of ceramics within one room.
The DYS technology can digitally print Iris Ceramica Group’s ceramic surfaces with any image or design, using a printing process that yields an ultra-high-definition finish, resulting in a unique ceramic product. In the case of Simeti’s patchwork-like installation, that is reflected in both shaded and solid colours, a shiny gold finish on the birds and butterflies, and the balance between the beasts dancing across the walls and the voids where white ceramic surfaces take centre stage.
Simeti’s works typically pull influences from nature and its collisions with the human world; that idea is represented here by the interaction between the abundance of nature in the artwork and the room where human beings interact. In one vignette, indigo wildebeest and striped zebras prance between shrubs and yellow flowers as a monochrome panther hides behind a green bush. Along one edge of the same wall, an elegant tapering bush rises from floor to ceiling, the design fluidly moving across to the adjacent wall as well. On another wall, a series of crescent-shaped designs depicting landscapes rich in flora and fauna evoke the details found on an elegant historic vase or plate – only in a larger format.
The three-way partnership between Iris Ceramica Group, Simeti and Fondazione Officine Saffi reflects the company’s mission: to re-engineer ceramics while enhancing the relationship between humankind and the environment. The installation also reflects the extraordinary versatility of the material, as the artist himself explains: “The ceramic process is really interesting as you work with variables that are often uncontrollable but always magical. Ceramics offer an almost infinite range of finishes: it can be shiny, matt, it can be polished, perfect, but also very rough. It has many souls.”
