THE COPPER HOUSE - LA CASA DE COBRE - LA CASA DI RAME

Andrea Ponsi, Alinea Editore, Florence, 2007

BUY ON AMAZON.IT

BUY ON AMAZON.COM

ISBN 978-8881254477

Introduction and forewords by Alessandro Mendini, Cristiano Toraldo di Francia and Vanni Pasca

From the introduction of Alessandro Mendini:

For Andrea Ponsi

Andrea Ponsi works on a challenging equation: that of infusing poetry into objects through a rigorous technological abstraction. This, it seems to me, is the subtlest and most sensitive purpose of his art. In the use of his favourite material, copper, he has for years been a master. With copper tubes, joints and sheets, and with the deeply magical, musical and natural colours of this archaic material, he develops like an alchemist an inexhaustible range of visual alembics. The result is a gentle story and infinite writing, achieved in a few essential, geometrical strokes, the Cartesian attitude being sublimated in a rarefied aesthetic of punctuated spaces. His scope is described between straight and curved lines, antennae, rhythms and pauses, abscissae and ordinates as presences measuring a metaphysical space.

From Leonardesque reminiscences of the precision of flying machines, and from the multiplicative fascination of Wachsmann’s modules, to the energetic stripes of Schlemmer’s theatrical costumes or to the slender vibratory delicacy of wires in Melotti’s miniature little theatres, one arrives at Andrea Ponsi, whose technologism is not ‘high’, nor even ‘new’, but rather, poetic and aesthetic: POE-TECH. It is made of slight, ancient, basic, elementary, oscillating and cosmic structures, devised by hand to bridge through gestures the dramatic chasm between project and construction that obsesses contemporaneity.

It is the intellectual challenge posed by a future where the Renaissance workshop maintains its credit alongside today’s virtual conception. Ponsi’s spatial design, both in the objects that are its connecting points, and in the surroundings that are its dilatation and emptied space, is geared to the assembly of visual meanings that he intends on each occasion to ascribe to his alphabet: His combination of ultra-pure idiosyncratic moods is adopted as a musician uses the score or a poet verse and rhyme.

From the introduction of Vanni Pasca:

"Ponsi's research ranges from domestic objects, installations, architecture and even exploration of the use of copper in order to return dignity and design quality to radiators and air conditioning systems in buildings. Uniting and providing a richly interesting vision, all these projects retain the balance between stripping down to a minimalist language and the material complexity of its transformation into objects. Fortunately, he has not fallen into providing a codified system of technological typologies, as is exeplified in the Produktformen of the Foster style. Likewise, this research path seems far from exhausted, as no defined mode of expression has been expressed. Thus it remains an open and living study. As such it is fascinating to observe and register its largely unpredictable future developments"...