Inside Rossana Orlandi’s Milan Design Week 2018: Marble, Flame and a Brass Menagerie

ART & CULTURE · MILAN

Reading time: 11 min

In a former tie factory in Milan’s San Vittore district, Rossana Orlandi assembled four distinct design languages under one courtyard roof for Milan Design Week 2018. Mattia Biagi printed a lifetime of photographic memory onto Carrara marble, Moritz Waldemeyer built a chandelier out of engineered flame, OCHRE brought two new pendant collections over from London, and Marcantonio Raimondi Malerba filled the rooms with a menagerie caught mid-theft with brass chandeliers in its teeth. None of it needed a shared theme to hold together, because the space itself has always been the argument.

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Rossana Orlandi’s exhibition space opened its doors for Milan Design Week 2018, which ran from 17 to 22 April that year as the Fuorisalone accompanying the 57th Salone del Mobile. The gallery occupies a former tie factory on Via Matteo Bandello, in Milan’s San Vittore district, a building Orlandi found while looking for a home for her children and converted instead into a showroom, retail space, office and courtyard for events, all wound around a central garden shaded by grape vines close to a century old.

Four presentations carried the week inside those rooms. Mattia Biagi showed sculptural furniture built from photographic collage printed directly onto marble. Moritz Waldemeyer installed a chandelier built from the flame technology he had spent years engineering with the veteran lighting designer Ingo Maurer. OCHRE, the London lighting and furniture house, brought two new pendant collections across from its Belgravia workshop. And Marcantonio Raimondi Malerba filled a room with hand sculpted animals and a single watching child, each gripping a piece of antique brass lighting as if it had just been prised loose.

What ties the four together is not a curatorial theme in the conventional sense. It is the way Orlandi has always worked: pick makers with a genuinely different material argument, put them in rooms designed to be walked through rather than browsed, and let the conversation between a marble chair and a brass gorilla do the rest. The queues that formed outside the gallery through the week were not there for one single object. They were there for the way the whole building reads as a single, carefully edited eye.

A tie factory built for looking, not just buying

Before she was one of the most influential talent spotters in contemporary design, Rossana Orlandi spent thirty years working in the fashion industry. She opened her gallery in 2002, in her late fifties, after finding the San Vittore building and deciding its rooms suited furniture and objects better than they would have suited a family home. The site had previously operated as a tie factory, and the ground floor still keeps some of the original vats once used to store fabric and yarn, a detail Orlandi has kept rather than concealed.

Her reputation was built on being early. She showed Maarten Baas, Formafantasma and Nacho Carbonell in the early stages of their careers, alongside longer relationships with Tom Dixon, Marcel Wanders and Studio Job, and international press has ranked her gallery among the handful of most important design spaces in the world. The description she gives of her own role, becoming “their mamma” to the designers she takes on, is not sentimentality so much as a working method: she backs people rather than trends, which is why a Rossana Orlandi show can put a marble sculptor, an engineer turned lighting designer, a heritage British lighting house and an Italian animal sculptor in the same building and have it read as coherent rather than crowded.

That is the frame the 2018 presentation sat inside. Each of the four names below was doing something specific with material and technique, and each fitted the same house style: serious craft, shown without a wall label doing the explaining for it.

Mattia Biagi’s marble built from a lifetime of clippings

Mattia Biagi was born in Ravenna in 1974 and trained in Milan before beginning his career in fashion, working with houses including Jean Paul Gaultier, Valentino and Armani. He then spent eleven years under Giulio Cappellini, a mentor he credits with a grounding that ran from product development through to event production, before relocating to Los Angeles to launch Cappellini’s American showroom. He went on to direct Minotti’s Los Angeles operation for more than sixteen years, and founded his own creative studio, Studio Dardo, in 2016, working across marble, wood, bronze and black tar.

The piece Orlandi showed in 2018 was Sit On My Face, a chair from Biagi’s Metropolitan Sets series, and it demonstrates the technique that runs through his independent sculptural work. Biagi builds his images from a personal archive of photographic clippings, pulled from magazines, art history, pornography and his own family photographs, and describes the resulting compositions as an anthology of memory and experience rather than a single picture. He prints those images directly onto slabs of Carrara marble using a multilayer ink process, then cuts and reassembles the printed stone into three dimensional collage, so the finished chair carries a face built from dozens of unrelated fragments rather than one photograph enlarged. Biagi has described the underlying subject as a personal investigation straddling life and death, nature and civilisation, preservation and transformation, themes he says the chair’s fragmented, faces-within-faces surface makes literal rather than metaphorical. At roughly 99 centimetres wide and 170 centimetres tall, it reads from across a room as a single carved bust and only resolves into hundreds of separate printed fragments on approach, which is precisely the effect a photographic collage cut into solid stone should produce.

Moritz Waldemeyer’s chandelier, and the flame that only works from a distance

Moritz Waldemeyer trained in mechatronics at King’s College London and worked as a research scientist at Philips before setting up his own practice, fusing engineering with fashion, lighting and performance design. German born and London based for more than two decades, he names Leonardo da Vinci, and specifically the idea of curiosity working across disciplines rather than staying inside one, as his central influence. That approach has carried him through collaborations with Ron Arad on the interactive Lolita and Miss Haze chandeliers, with Zaha Hadid on the Z Island kitchen, and with the fashion designer Hussein Chalayan on garments that transform and play video mid-runway. He has built laser embedded stage jackets worn by Rihanna and Bono, LED performance pieces for Kylie Minogue and Will.i.am, and a video system used across a Take That stadium tour seen by around 1.5 million people, alongside work for Audi, Bentley, Cirque du Soleil and Swarovski, whose director Nadja Swarovski has said Waldemeyer combines current technology with a genuine understanding of design aesthetics, a pairing she notes is rare.

The chandelier shown at Rossana Orlandi drew on flame technology Waldemeyer engineered with Ingo Maurer, first launched as Flying Flames in 2013. Each flame element in the system carries two small screens built from 128 individually dimmable LEDs, running an animated recording of a flame rather than a fixed glow, with a dimmer on the circuit board letting the intensity and speed of the flicker be adjusted by hand. The elements attach magnetically to a canopy board and can be arranged at different heights and densities, so the finished piece behaves less like a single fitting than a modular system a room can be built around. Seen from across a gallery, the effect is a genuinely convincing candle flicker; seen close, the flame resolves into a grid of individually lit points, a piece of the mechanism showing through the illusion rather than hiding behind it. That double read, real from a distance and legibly engineered up close, is the same trick that runs through most of Waldemeyer’s other work: the technology is never disguised as magic, it is offered as a piece of craft in its own right.

OCHRE’s new pendant collections, in glass and concealed light

OCHRE, the British lighting and furniture house, was founded in London in 1996 by Joanna Bibby and Harriet Maxwell Macdonald, with Solenne de la Fouchardière joining as the third partner four years later. The studio works on a made to order basis from its own workshops, favouring FSC certified wood, bronze, glass and natural fibre alongside traditional hand forming techniques, and has built its reputation on private residences and boutique hospitality projects that call for pieces no catalogue can supply off the shelf.

At Rossana Orlandi in 2018, OCHRE launched new configurations of two pendant collections. Gaia pairs solid glass drops with concealed LEDs and a choice of antique brass, blackened nickel or satin nickel hardware, arranged in asymmetric tiers rather than a symmetrical chandelier form, with the largest version carrying ten separate glass elements across roughly 142 centimetres. Moonlight Murmuration takes the same solid glass drop and concealed LED principle further, offering configurations named “swoop” and “wave” that scale from twenty to sixty four individual drops, the largest spanning over two metres. The name borrows directly from the natural phenomenon it evokes: a murmuration is the fluid, coordinated shape a flock of starlings makes in flight, and OCHRE’s arrangement of glass drops, denser in some areas and looser in others rather than laid out on a grid, is built to read the same way, as one continuous moving form rather than a fixed row of fittings. OCHRE brought the same instinct home a month later, opening its own Clerkenwell showroom to twelve craft makers curated by Flow Gallery for Clerkenwell Design Week 2018.

Marcantonio Raimondi Malerba’s menagerie, caught mid-theft

Marcantonio Raimondi Malerba was born in 1976 in Massalombarda and trained at art institute and academy level before beginning his career in theatre production design, working alongside architects on staged environments. That background shows in the series he brought to Rossana Orlandi in 2018, Instinct Illumination, a self produced collection of hand sculpted figures that fuses classical figurative technique with genuine antique brass chandelier components.

Each piece follows the same method: a clay model, a mould taken from it, a cast reproduction, then hand retouching to finish the surface, before an actual antique brass fitting is worked into the sculpture as its light source. Marcantonio has said he chose real chandeliers specifically for the exclusivity their brass value and their own manual difficulty add to the finished piece, rather than reaching for a cheaper substitute. The room at Rossana Orlandi held a giraffe carrying a chandelier in its mouth, She’s in Love but She Doesn’t Know It Yet, drifting along a dreamlike walk with its light; a wild boar with brass fragments still gripped between its teeth, What a Boar!, as if recently caught destroying the fitting; a Jack Russell terrier surrounded by disassembled brass parts, 5 Minutes Alone, playing on the breed’s reputation for mischief; a gorilla dragging a heavy brass element in Just a Drag; and a child bent over a small crystal chandelier in Before the Beginning, examining the light the way a scientist studies a specimen. Exposed wiring, left deliberately visible and slightly frayed at each point of contact, completes the illusion that the fittings have just been taken apart, even as every bulb stays lit.

The series is worth reading against Marcantonio’s wider practice rather than as an isolated gallery moment. He had already designed the resin Monkey Lamp for the Italian manufacturer Seletti in 2015, a mass produced figure holding a bulb aloft in sitting, standing and hanging versions, and the same idea, an animal as the light’s own bearer, resurfaced in an expanded Seletti collaboration shown as far as Stockholm Furniture & Light Fair in 2019, alongside a companion series of vases modelled on the anatomical form of a heart valve. Set beside those two points, Instinct Illumination reads as the middle register in a single, ongoing line of thinking: a designer moving between industrially produced editions for Seletti and one off, hand cast gallery sculptures built from genuine antique fittings, testing the same instinct, an animal caught holding its own light source, in two entirely different manufacturing registers across at least four years. That continuity, an idea tested in resin for a manufacturer and in cast brass and plaster for a gallery within the same practice, is not something either presentation states outright. It only becomes visible by tracking the work across venues and years, which is exactly what a single show write up cannot do on its own.

Final thoughts

It would be easy to read Rossana Orlandi’s 2018 presentation as four unrelated names sharing a building for a week. What the rooms in San Vittore actually held was a set of makers each solving a version of the same problem, how to make light or form do something a catalogue photograph cannot, in entirely different materials. Biagi solved it in printed marble that only resolves at range. Waldemeyer solved it in a flame that reveals its own mechanism the closer you look. OCHRE solved it in glass drops arranged to move like a flock rather than hang like a fitting. Marcantonio solved it by handing the light to an animal and letting the wiring show.

None of that needed a wall text to explain, because the building itself has been making the same argument since 2002: put serious craft in a room designed for walking through, and visitors will do the connecting themselves. The queues outside the gallery that April were not queuing for any single object. They were queuing for the version of Milan Design Week that only a genuinely curated space, rather than a trade hall, can offer.