Part 1
During the ten years of artistic direction of the Richard Ginori Company, from 1923 to 1933, Gio Pontin, the most versatile Italian architect and designer of the 20th century, created three hundred and fifty designs and two hundred models for the historic Docile ceramic factories. They were magnificent objects of unparalleled elegance, often unique pieces of great sophistication and at the same time of extreme simplicity. Many of them are now on display at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris for a major retrospective, Tutu Pont, Gio Pont archi-designer, organized by Sophie Bouilhet-Dumas, Dominique Forest and Salvatore Licit, which for the first time pays a complete tribute to the eclectic genius of Italian architectural design, through the multiple manifestations of its infinity.
The Parisian exhibition presents vases, ceramics, sketches, sketches, paintings, but also lamps, tables, furniture, plans of Italian-style houses designed and their furniture, created in sixty years of activity, as well as notes, the beautiful travel diaries, the drawings made for the Carrier del Sera in a hundred and one passages, the objects written for the Milanese daily newspaper as well as many articles designed for craftsmen and industrialists, such as Christoffel, Venin, Font an Arte, Casino, Singer & Sons, Altaïr : handles, candlesticks, candlesticks, candlesticks, fabrics, cutlery, crockery, crockery, costumes, sanitary articles, chandeliers, tiles, frames, chairs, armchairs, tables all from many archives such as the Anal y Armand Plainchant Foundation, Palazzo Bau and Livia no, or from private collections such as Antonella Fiorucci's, who lent a walnut and enamelled copper console by Paolo De Pole at the last moment. More than sixty lenders, sponsors such as Mon tent and Richard Gino rig, some forty academics and associated institutions, and the exemplary installation designed by Jean-Michel Wilmette, with the collaboration of Italy Lupin, have thus made it possible to rebuild Gio Pont's entire artistic and creative career from the 1920s to the late 1970s.
The first object that captures attention is a 1924-25 majolica vase, Women on the Clouds, decorated in white and blue with many swollen women's bodies lying on the clouds, while around the group of ancient Roman names, Domitilla, Emerenziana, Apollo, Ballina, evoke black martyrs of the first Christian era. The fact is that, having joined Richard Gino laughed in 1923 thanks to the family of his wife Giulia Vimercati, Gio Pont enjoyed from the beginning revisiting the motifs of tradition, from archaeology to architecture, less to pay homage to his masters, Vitruvian, Sergio, Paladin, and much less to obey the skilful game of estimates, but to create a new style, a modern style that gives him a unique, recognizable and Italian identity and ensures his competitiveness on the market. In 1924, participating in the Exposition des Arts décoratifs et modernes, the first major international post-war exhibition, held in Paris at the Esplanade des Invalids, with Costa La Conversations Classique, Gio Points won the jury's sale prize in ceramics.
Here is the magnificent white porcelain urn from the Dacia factory, with stylized designs alternating with geometric lines and gilded relief decorations with agate points, which have the shape of kneeling angels, while a classic muse resting on a column offers the handle to lift the lid. This reinterpretation of classical art in the name of ultra-contemporary taste was acclaimed in Paris in the 1920s, capital of culture, eager to break with the past by inventing new, freer and more fluid forms in all artistic fields, from dance to painting, music to architecture, but highly dependent on the tradition of the past. Points porcelain is a simple and polished form that lends itself perfectly to drawing, as is the case of the Origin Prospective vase of 1925, the other famous Gino vase in blue, white and yellow porcelain, with the lines of the tiles that follow each other along the curve in a geometric design, multiplying infinitely to now accommodate a capital, a column, a circle, an arch, a cylinder, a beak, a point, a stele and represent not only taste, but Italian civilization.
The Milanese architect, a graduate of the Ecole Poly technique, made his debut as an artist. He liked to define himself as an artist in love with architecture, but he was very attentive to the interplay between industry and craftsmanship, as shown by another exhibition presented at the MAD, Labyrinth, a silk fabric painted and partially embroidered with gold threads by the artisans of the Cernobbio school in 1928-30, commissioned by Carla Visionnai de Modrone. Industry is the way of expression of the 20th century, it is the way it creates. In the combination of art and industry, art is a category, industry is a condition, wrote Points on the occasion of the International Exhibition of Decorative and Modern Industrial Arts in Paris in 19254. To understand what is modern, we must only consider in exhibitions the things that are part of the market, that accompany our lives in clothing and in the everyday environment.
From ceramics to furniture, the process is short. After his success at the Paris Exhibition, where his vases were stolen, to the point of having to reorganize all the stock for the Monday Biennale, here he is with Tony Bouillon, the young owner of Christoffel, known in Paris and immediately won over by the style of this very elegant and jovial Italian, with whom he immediately made a friendship that would last more than fifty years. For the famous Parisian company, Pont produced new models, such as the Flèche, presented at the Venice Biennale in 1928, a candelabra formed by two cornucopias gathered around an arrow in a kind of embrace, symbol of the marriage between his niece, Carla Boulet, and Bouillons himself, the married couple for whom Pont designed its first and only house built in France, in Garches, in the Parisian countryside, the Flying Angel, a perfect example of Italian life in the neo-Palladian style, which reproduces the mixture of modernity and classicism experienced by Richard Gino ri.
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