Floornature

Why hire an architect or a designer to create ceramic surfaces? What is the need for this kind of specialisation? The answer is clear: it takes someone with an idea of the kind of service a wall covering can provide to come up with a truly innovative solution.

Acting on two fronts, technical and aesthetic, a designer of porcelain stoneware tiles manages to create a synthesis which does justice to both components, transforming a simple “tile” into a cultivated design experience with a high emotional impact. One such collection that has met with a lot of success in recent months is Pillart from Eiffelgres, designed by Mauro Bellei. In a transverse reading of this project we may identify all the concepts which demonstrate just how much work goes into the design and industrial production of a ceramic tile, revealing the stages that make Pillart an example of complete industrial design.
Interpretation of natural stone through the industrial process of production of solid porcelain stoneware underlines a stylistic choice on the part of the designer combining a procedure of selection, pressing and firing of powdered earths to obtain a strong, long-lasting product with a soft yet strong appearance, in different hues or a solid colour: it takes a talented architect to make good use of such a compendium of extremes. And this is where two more essential aspects of Mauro Bellei’s design come into play: his references to the world of art, and his minimal choices of absolute abstraction and reduction. The former reconnects ceramic surfaces with the history of architecture and design with the aim of leaving designers free to fit this product into all kinds of living spaces, strengthening its character; the second abstracts the contemporary to make it into an industrial product, where minimalism and simplicity are not synonymous with emptiness, but are the expression of a wealth of meaning and culture transformed into an object for everyday use.

As the architect himself says: “... My response was based on the idea of a product containing the required features along with its double, but in the negative: not one, but two distinct surfaces inspired by a single matrix...”. The theme of the double takes material form here in the continuous transitions between extremes which Pillart reveals: darkness and light, colour and its absence, form and image. For Pillart interprets black and white in two shades of grey, one light and the other dark, underlining both the ability for camouflage that may be expressed in a living environment and the contemporary conceptual expressiveness of the absence of absolutes. New characteristics of colour for living which approach but never reach the extreme identities of black and white, as if in a continuous metamorphosis of matter.
Of course none of this is far removed from the concrete nature of an industrial product; Mauro Bellei returns to the everyday nature of construction, declaring that “... a simple idea is interwoven with an industrial process: on the one hand, through a natural surface for interiors which presents the chromatic minimum of a positive and its negative, and on the other with a very rough surface for outdoor use... ”. In this act of design he closes the circle, producing a product that speaks of synthesis and personality, giving a ceramic surface all the culture of design, made up of history and modernity, abstraction and concreteness, but above all using matter as what it is intended to be, not simply as an expression of the latest decorative trends.

Paolo Schianchi

PRODUCT MENTIONED

Pillart Eiffelgres