04.20.18
Fair Report
The Best Thing We Saw in Milan Today, Day 4
We’ve never seen any shame in a finish fetish, and at this week’s Milan fair the Amsterdam-based studio Odd Matter did the art movement proud with a project called Guise. Developed for a brand new contemporary/experimental arm of Nilufar Gallery called Far — which also had its official launch this week — Guise consists of three benches and a console made from carved foam that’s been coated in either iridescent car lacquer, or a classical faux-marble painting technique called Scagliola.
The methods “stem from very different historical periods,” the designers note. “Scagliola is a technique of making realistic artificial marble, used to adorn churches and palaces such as Versailles, while the spray-painting technique comes from the custom car industry. As such we might also be able to observe an ancestral tendency to put great effort in creating the surface of things to make them more attractive and desirable. Guise plays with these notions … embracing an almost scary instinct to subvert the meaning of something and fake its real nature.” At press time there were no images available of the Scagliola bench, but we’ll put it into Saturday Selects as soon as there are; meanwhile check out the two versions that are on view at Alcova (Via Popoli Uniti 11-13) through the end of the day tomorrow.