Gufram - Sassi pouf

Decontextualize: this is Piero Gilardi’s mantra. Recreate the bucolic atmosphere of a mountain river or the ocean cliffs inside the domestic space - this was his aim: to empty the weight of an object, but let its image - rather its artificial reproduction - keep the poetry and the evocative simplicity from which these objects come alive for the user. And the so the series Sassi is born. Sedilsasso, the biggest rock - to be used as a chair - comes with two more pebbles of smaller proportions, which go together to recreate for all purposes a natural contemplative set. Sassi, artificially natural, are an oxymoron, a vision of design that demolishes and subverts the proved parameters of tactile and visual perception. Same skin, same volume, same tones, same roughness, same outer layer of natural stones, but different substance and weight, that turn them into innocuous boulders; freed from gravity and light, they rise to a new life. In the scenic design of the living space they become a soft seating system - an innocent deceit able to create a short-circuit between usage and end use, between reality and fiction. The meaning itself of the product is multiplied and strengthened exponentially by addition and accumulation.

Piero Gilardi

Piero Gilardi was born in Turin in 1942 and studied at the Art School and at the Accademia Albertina in Turin.
A pioneer in the technological art experience, in the 60’s Gilardi was one of the protagonists of the Nouveau Realisme and the European Pop Art. In 1963 he realised his first private exhibit “Machines For the Future”; two years later he conceived the first pieces in polyurethane foam for Gufram, and started to display his works in several cultural poles in the world — among them Paris, Brussels, Cologne, Hamburg, Amsterdam and New York.
From 1968 he adhered to the new artistic trends of the period — Arte Povera, Land Art, Anti-form Art, — and collaborated at the realization of some international reviews.

Gufram

Gufram is an Interior Design Italian brand globally known for pushing the limits of industrial design. With its Radical Design spirit and its nonconformist experimentation linked to aesthetic, technological and material research, Gufram has created seats and interior design icons that have entered collective imagination: playful, subversive and desecrating products with a POP soul, willingly designed as anti-design items. Gufram was born in Turin as an artisanal entity, where the craftsmen specialized in upholstery, cabinet making and furniture padding met the artistic and international avant-garde with the goal to give birth to a new way of understanding modern furniture. Since 1966 Gufram has been producing design icons that have become unique in form and value thanks to the cross-contamination between the industrial design approach, the artisanal creation and the imaginative flair typical of art. Gufram's unmistakable furniture items like the couch Bocca, the chaise lounge Pratone and the hall tree Cactus (just to name a few), also known as Domestic Sculptures able to interpret the contact point between both the artistic and the design worlds, are now displayed in the most beautiful houses and in the most renowned museums in the world.