Nilufar Rare Carpets and Furniture
Milan, February 13, 2004
Carpet Maps
Three carpets by Beppe Caturegli on exhibition at Galleria Nilufar
On the occasion of the inauguration of the Salone Internazionale del Mobile (the International Furniture Exhibition) in the city of Milan, Galleria Nilufar, in via della Spiga 32, will present three carpets designed by Beppe Caturegli (Caturegli Formica, in collaboration with GaMe) exclusively for Nilufar. The show will open on Wednesday, April 14, 2004, at 6:30 p.m., and the carpets will remain on display until Monday, April 19, 2004. The gallery will be open every day from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m., and from 3:00 p.m. to 7:30 p.m., with the exception of Sundays.
The carpets are entitled: Market (395 x 280 cm), Consumer (395 x 280 cm) and Healthcare (370 x 280 cm).
The carpet designs present themselves as a mental map of several of the major, interconnecting nodes of the Western model of modern civilization: financial power, consumerism, the new technologies of daily life… We look at geometric fields of solid background colors dotted with squares and rectangles of various sizes and hues, juxtaposed on the basis of associations between their meanings, but always anchored to the word that defines the territory to which they belong. These are maps of the world of the values on which our daily decisions depend, and it may very well be opportune to consult them whenever we walk across them. Each of these works is a kind of “memo for the coming millennium,” and a guide to the forces that control the games of economics. These geometric patterns are never boring, never cloying, and hold up to the wear and time while offering a telling photograph of the ways in which values are distributed and weighted in our currently dominant systems of thought.
Some will see these works to have the presence of a video wall. Others will see a scattered pattern of gigantic pixels. Still others will see a satellite photo of crops that cover the fields of landscapes where human beings have left a decisive mark. Others again will find themselves facing the skylines of the vast American cities. There will also be those who are captivated by the social vector of the work, and by Others will be captured by the social moment and by the spirit of provocation in a catalogue of ideas. And others, finally, will rediscover the designer’s source of inspiration: the brusque, staccato poetry of stock-market charts.
Caturegli’s mental maps in any case are thoroughly captivating, with a sudden, direct, and unexpected thrust that strikes to the center of the questions they attempt to raise. They make their statement not by imposing a system of values, but rather by setting distances which make it possible to look more acutely at a world in a state of constant change. Walking across these carpets may perhaps set up the atmosphere of a suspension of judgement. Or it may help us reconsider the problems they want to pose. The fact that these are objects to walked on may also prove to hold a touch of irony. While working on his models and drawings, Beppe Caturegli was to write: “Upon opening a web page that showed the movements of the stock market, I found myself in the midst of a landslide of megabytes of metaphor…. It was as though one had opened the door of a closet that held all sorts of personal objects that had always been used individually, and which never before had been seen together as parts of a single world. I encountered the notion of a world divided into products and solutions represented by rectangles, of which the size indicates the market share achieved by a corporation, and where color shows whether the value of its stock is rising or falling.” And again: “It’s only a graph, but it represents a bird’s-eye view in which things which had been presumed to be an harmonious whole reveal themselves, perhaps, to exist in a state of constant struggle, where species and individuals are always fighting to affirm themselves and survive. Every activity–even the freest–is subject to conditions and rules, and to greater and lesser powers, and all these elements can be described, catalogued, formalized, analyzed and finally evaluated…. The world is so complex that it’s virtually impossible to look at all of its dimensions at once…. The hope, here, is that the surgical reduction of reality to a single two-dimensional section or itself can be more effective than a multidimensional approach.”
Galleria Nilufar web site >>
Salone internazionale del mobile web site >>

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