"Sacred and Profane": il Casone at the Fuori Salone, Milan 22-27 April
Il Casone’s pietra serena: a backdrop for all "subjects"
Il Casone will be amongst the companies taking part in “Sacred and Profane”, an evocative exhibition that came from “Natural Stone Vision”, the interdisciplinary project launched last year at the Carrara Marmotec 2008 with the aim of restoring vigour and substance to the dialogue between the marble industry and the world of architects and designers.
Held in Milan’s Tortona district, at number 35, Via Stendhal to be precise, in the Giovannoni room, during the Fuori Salone, “Sacred and Profane”, directed by the architects, Paolo Armenise and Silvia Nerbi, will put flesh and bones on an odyssey of reassessment of the stone market, and its approach to creativity and design. The message is clear: stone materials in the service of design!
Sacred and Profane was begun as a challenge, but above all it seeks to be the key to the interpretation at the heart of any concept of landscape design in which profoundly different materials find a common, expressive language through the vehicle of the project. It is the place in any project where different experiences and narratives meet, generating values and ideas that are no longer exclusively about bridging the gap between global and local, but display a potential for development that goes beyond any national borders.
These are narratives of “material”, as the architect Paolo Armenise puts it, and among these different narratives, Il Casone will be relating its own, through the eloquent vocabulary of pietra serena. An expressivity that is sought, in this particular context, in the sphere of the “unconventional”, in the tailor-made use of stone aimed at restoring textures and experimental cladding that is novel and captivating.
Pietra serena is used as cladding in various areas of the exhibition, both horizontally and vertically, to create a backdrop of various design elements, these too produced using sandstone from Il Casone. Bearing the signatures of prestigious names, these finishing elements will be displayed especially for the occasion: it will thus be possible to see, for example, the Acqua series, Antonio Lupi’s system of basins and containers, and the Achilles table of L’Abbate.
As far as the stone cladding is concerned, what will astonish is the particular cut of the “slabs/slats” used: these, in fact, will be taken from that margin of waste stone that is obtained during the usual cutting phase of a slab before final processing.
These “off-cuts” produce irregular slats that seem to have been cut randomly, but which, once in place, form a skin of very expressive material in which the nature of the stone seems to have got the better of the rationality of the man who cut it, and who designed it on paper.
It is the eternal dichotomy that has always characterised this material: nature and artifice, the unintentional and the rational.
“Architecture becomes the simple reading of the textures that form before the eyes. The stone and the long-standing rituals of mankind have already designed everything, and so the project becomes a mere work of didactic reading,” commented the architect, Armenise, who, alongside the company, is engaged in investigating these scenographic effects.
The spirit with which Il Casone approaches these events is the spirit of someone who loves to experiment and enquire, making its great experience available to creative artists, with the aim of putting forward original and novel solutions that trigger other ideas, other visual and sensorial design suggestions.
It is the spirit of those who, like Il Casone, love to appreciate the connections and synergies between different areas such as design, architecture, well being, food, tradition and technology … in order, always, to relate new narratives, and to be a leading player in the transformation and evolution of our times.
Don’t miss the appointment: Milan april 22-27