For 60 years, Gaetano Pesce has been preaching the gospel of uncertainty in design. Finally, the world has caught up. MatthewSchneier reports
Gaetano Pesce, Homo resinatus. Photo: Bubi Canal for New York Magazine This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.
Who else would propose to an Italian company that it make ashtrays in the shape of Christ’s crucified hand so you could tap your ashes directly into His bloody stigmata? Or make models out of raw meat for an exhibition at the Louvre, then let them putrefy until the museum was overwhelmed by the smell? “There are lots of my colleagues who do decoration or nice things,” he says. “I don’t care about that.
The Pesce Archive: Five decades of breaking the mold. From left, 1972: Rag Chair. 1980: Sunset in New York Sofa. From left: Photo: Heather Sten. Courtesy of From Out in the World with Gaetano Pesce by Museum Books, 2021Photo: Courtesy of Gaetano Pesce Studio./ The Pesce Archive: Five decades of breaking the mold. From left, 1972: Rag Chair. 1980: Sunset in New York Sofa. From left: Photo: Heather Sten. Court... more The Pesce Archive: Five decades of breaking the mold.
Pesce spent the ’60s and ’70s living and lecturing all over Europe, with stops in Helsinki, London, and Paris. He thrilled to the idea that furniture, in addition to being functional, could be narrative, polemical, transformational. You could literally bring a message home.
Pesce’s renown continued to grow in the States, as did his commissions. In 1993, he designed an “organic building,” in Osaka, Japan, whose exterior is studded with live plants, slyly anticipating the “green” architecture of today. In 1994, he was commissioned to design the cutting-edge, open-plan, hot-desk headquarters of the advertising agency Chiat/Day, where employees were given loaner laptops and mobile phones and were asked to keep their personal effects in lockers.
The introduction of affordable, licensed Pesce resin pieces — as opposed to his studio-made artworks — has opened up his oeuvre to a much larger clientele. Two years ago, Fabiana Faria and Helena Barquet began carrying these accessible, commercially produced items at Coming Soon, their Lower East Side design shop. They had sourced Pesce pieces for interior-design clients and loved his work but weren’t sure how it would be taken by a less learned customer.
Pesce has little time for a work once it leaves the studio in the clutches of a happy buyer. In Brooklyn, a few floors up from the studio in the Navy Yard, is a separate storeroom he rarely visits, filled tightly with pieces awaiting their next home. The client tends to follow the wishes of the work, rather than the other way around. “Nobody ask anything to me because I am considered someone difficult,” he says. “They say, ‘Don’t work with this guy.
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