Kataba, “it is written”, a modern memento mori to which Davdesain has decided to assign new aesthetic and visual power, creating the world’s first jewel funeral urn. Objects, beyond conferring prestige and comfort, possess the inherent role of immediately communicating the power of the emotions we can attribute to our name and our lived experience. What sense would it make to spend only part of human existence surrounded by beauty, only to abandon it when we are now merely a memory?
KATABA is the first example of funerary design object ever created in the modern era. KATABA, from the Arabic “it is written”, as a tangible memory of an indelible mark, of a lived experience that powerfully traversed the cosmos, sealing the stars in the fulfilment of the divine project each of us is called to accomplish. On a circular base made of various materials such as agate, crystal and marble, a central square pedestal is applied to symbolise the four cardinal points within which this soul conducted its visceral existence.
The urn was produced in gold with a hermetic closure featuring magnetic reinforcement that, through magnets, keeps it firmly anchored to the base, symbolising the bond between sky and earth, while the gold coating symbolises the primordial symbol of incorruptibility. Above the urn stretches an arch in black agate, a projection towards the infinite sky that nonetheless reconnects to the earth in an endless cycle fed by love and memory. On the circular base, a carpet of green arctic lichens symbolises eternity.
A small monument to memory, a design object that serves to transcend all the pain of absence and elevate it through forms and vibrations that delight the eye in a rigorous play of light capable of nullifying despair and dispersing it into boundless serenity. To remember what we are now, to have become what we will be tomorrow.
This sofa is an emblem of solitude and of how, at times, one must run headlong into madness to feel less pain. A sofa that sent DAVDESAIN to the moon in search of a peace that never arrived. And so the mind arms itself, launching into orbit over a world in celebration, searching for that microscopic spark of love lost in the heart of an unexpected storm where everything recalled the loved one who had by then become absence and anguish.
So we fled to the moon, into an apocalyptic scenario in search of a love that didn’t seem to dwell there either, and while we waited for the stars to show us the way, he appeared: the sofa “While I wait and I cannot stay”. A two-seater adorned with sharp, gleaming metal elements at its edges, a fragment of a spacecraft that could not withstand the impact of the heart; the metal to signal the compactness of pain when it falls upon us, a shape that, though sinuous, remains pointed and enduring like thoughts that cannot escape this despair: it is also a pain that then crystallises and shines between two seats in hammered black calfskin, where the alert yellow recalls the electricity of reason. In this mad lunar pilgrimage, the mind turns to the second piece of the diptych, the bench “pupo01”.
Cognac leather and gold-coloured hardware, this too waiting for a forgiveness, a light and a consolation lost in space but which Davdesain wanted to imagine alive and landed in a world we will never find. The screech of metal as a symbol of universal pain and the need for closeness, for skin: perhaps this sofa truly did soothe the wounds of those who have lost themselves? Dedicated to those who wait for something that can only be found on the Moon.
When beauty is called upon to tell a story, it becomes crucial to faithfully celebrate the emotional impact of the story itself as well, making it contemporary and perpetually valid. When this happens, beauty becomes canon, tool and memory. It is almost unbelievable how the charm and grandeur of Pompeii, after millennia, still manages to enchant humanity at every single latitude.
Vesevo was born from a particular request: to succeed in interpreting, with modernity and style, a lighting piece that could contain all the drama and majesty of the Vesuvius tragedy. A remarkable evocative power, at times theatrical, even melancholic, capable of taking the observer on an ever-evolving journey through time. Vesevo was born: a variable number of Roman busts in crystal, in memory of the furnishings hurled to the ground by the eruption and recovered in perfect condition centuries later.
Each bust differs from the next, produced in crystal and black; clean, theatrical forms that in their silence speak of loss but also of harmony, before which every sorrow crystallises. A bespoke chandelier, an ode capable of celebrating the untamed power of beauty, a universal bond between the irreconcilable and the absolute. Designed by Davdesain.
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle tells us that we can never know precisely where an electron is located around an atom. And yet quantum physics teaches us that particles begin to exist the very moment they are conceived in a specific location.
From this suggestion Q-ANTIC was born, a chair designed for a young, eclectic and multifaceted Korean client in search of a bold decorative element that would break with minimalist tradition. The chair’s philosophy is to exist “in a world in constant oscillation”, until the mind feels alive and placed in a determined space, a mirror of our own reality. The gold accents symbolise a golden circle representing power, a universally recognised meaning through rings and medals, and the sun, representing the infinite cycle of things that must resemble themselves even as they change.
Davdesain was commissioned to design an extraordinary wedding gift for a Chinese client. The recipient was a powerful, established man of humble origins, small in stature. The eldest of nine siblings, the groom-to-be had been the driving force of his family since childhood, marked by a rigour, discipline and effort that made him the influential entrepreneur he is today.
The concept had to represent an unexpected, surprising power, concentrated in a segment of compressed matter with an unpredictable visual impact. The Laocoon of the Vatican Museums, finely carved using waterjet technique in Calacatta gold marble, is topped by an ovoid platform in black tempered crystal. Silently bearing the weight of life with majesty and discretion, Davdesain designed a bespoke table to celebrate the sense of family that has guided this man’s entire existence.
Like Laocoon, he remains immobile, prodigious and unstoppable in the face of life’s upheavals and hardships, never yielding. The message of protection arrives as clear as crystal, carved on a rock-crystal plaque at the base of the marble pedestal. “Love is a ladder on which the gods descend to us and we rise up to them.”
Something resists today’s creative decay, the unyielding technicality that the eye absorbs and reworks with every glance; something remains that still knows how to cross into the bounds of the most uncontaminated emotionality, inviting us, from the standpoint of perceptual psychology, to keep clear the childlike vision through which to observe the world. Amid the vast selection of doses in which every sort of pain is sold to us, an unusual visual narrative makes its way, one that in its unassuming approach carries the power to move and to heal. The illustrations of Benito Fiola (@benito.illustrator), in their ecstatic naturalness, manage to restore a sense of childlike wonder to the observer’s eyes.
Illustrations of an undergrowth of melancholic, dreaming, timeless creatures that, with every brushstroke, embody a universally accessible sentimental dictionary. Fragility, dreaming, the defenceless necessity to exist in all one’s own splendid smallness makes Benito’s watercolour illustrations a symbol that goes beyond the figure; his creations appear as a reminder to recalibrate the sense of the measured and the radiant that is capable of existing in every declination of being; far from the booming digital celebrations of a hollow, inherited, unmotivated and often mystified grandeur. Admiring his illustrations is therapy for the spirit, against the excess of negative stimuli, it is the destruction of those behavioural codes based on haste, aggression, the omnipresent visual self-centredness from which we suffer and to which we increasingly want to conform, nullifying every hypothetical message, provided it knows how to renew itself identically within its own emptiness.
Can illustrations heal? Yes. Neurodesign has a duty to instruct the observer on the dangers the eye encounters when sifting through sets of lines and colours devoid of meaning. The dimension of discretion, of being enough, of resisting, silent and patient, before the jolts, is the promise Benito manages to keep; portraiture that, like the illustrations made entirely by hand, restores authority to the exclusively human capacity to place in what is created more than a response in volumes and tones, but rather a burning subset of stimuli to be protected for every observer, from a universally human hand to a humanly universal eye.
Unlike today’s religious narrative, where cloying beauty is followed by marked mediocrity and a repetitiveness of forms now emptied of meaning, the artist Kobi chooses to tell of faith and the figure of Christ with a raw, material pictorial language, capable of conveying the full dramatic weight of the crucifixion and, at the same time, the hope of resurrection. His canvases, dense with colour and gesture, do not seek easy consolation but the truth of the human experience in pain, in falling, and in the possibility of rising again.
Kobi paints a Christ who is at once apocalypse and promise, ruin and rebirth, restoring to contemporary religious painting a visual force rarely found in conventional representations. Revitalising the human dimension starting from Jesus, the highest revolutionary gesture, believing that humanity still has a chance at rebirth.
Trapped in a crescendo of physical tension and mechanical awareness, today’s living being, more than at any other point in history, has made its relationship with time an element of the utmost existential, aesthetic and emotional definition. A time laden with obsession and fragility, a continuous oscillation between the uncertainty of the future and the glory of a past now vanished. It is precisely here, in this complex becoming, that Sly begins to create – a Belgian sculptor-artist who, with unrepeatable mastery, has managed to elevate haute horology into a new form of contemporary sculpture, in an alchemy of inspiration, poetry and madness that seems to have pulled his creations straight from the Mad Hatter’s hat.
His pieces appear as sinuous metallic evolutions, luminous and intricate, behind which vessels, armours and other incredible silhouettes are concealed, each chiselled with singular mastery, on the verge of coming to life at any moment. Jewels, dials, crowns – everything combines in a diabolically harmonious way to give us a further, even higher meaning, not of time itself but of the forms in which we long to crystallise its passing. It is a perennial sense of research and sacrifice, of measured passion that, without half measures, wins out over the most refined and powerful machine in terms of creativity, craftsmanship and beauty.
Man returns to being a creator, drawing from the world and reinterpreting it using unexplored materials and meanings to give life to a contribution of rare beauty. Sly exalts the sculptural dimension, standing halfway between celestial welder, perfect technician and untamed creative to tell us an idea of meta-time, free from the smallness of mediocrity and the torments of chaos from which, especially at this exact moment in history, an unexpected gust of courage and challenge seems to originate. Sly’s horological sculptures enchant us, alert us and call us to meditate on who the creator is today, for what centrality to fight, and in what memory to remain: Sly is the tangible proof that progress, evolution and technology will always come second in the creative act, because perhaps the true message behind his sculpture is exactly that – to rediscover what, hopelessly divine, we have found again over time and which, at the very same time, we are slowly losing.
This seat is an emblem of solitude and of how, at times, one must run headlong into madness to feel less pain. A sofa that sent DAVDESAIN to the moon in search of a peace that never arrived. And so the mind arms itself, launching into orbit over a world in celebration, searching for that microscopic spark of love lost in the heart of an unexpected storm where everything recalled the loved one who had by then become absence and anguish.
So we fled to the moon, into an apocalyptic scenario in search of a love that didn’t seem to dwell there either, and while we waited for the stars to show us the way, he appeared: the sofa “while I wait and I cannot stay”. A two-seater adorned with sharp, gleaming metal elements at its edges, a fragment of a spacecraft that could not withstand the impact of the heart; the metal to signal the compactness of pain when it falls upon us, a shape that, though sinuous, remains pointed and enduring like thoughts that cannot escape this despair: it is also a pain that then crystallises and shines between two seats in hammered black calfskin, where the alert yellow recalls the electricity of reason. In this mad lunar pilgrimage, the mind turns to the second piece of the diptych, the bench “pupo01”.
Cognac leather and gold-coloured hardware, this too waiting for a forgiveness, a light and a consolation lost in space but which Davdesain wanted to imagine alive and landed in a world we will never find. The screech of metal as a symbol of universal pain and the need for closeness, for skin: perhaps this sofa truly did soothe the wounds of those who have lost themselves? Dedicated to those who wait for something that can only be found on the Moon.
Ravenous, wary, crowned with reverential awe, smeared with more than 10 textures in unison; an intense coming and going of shattered fibres, splinters, amorphous lattices, elements that in their archetypal tendency to clash and annihilate one another, re-emerge from the hands of sculptor Antonio Massarutto as tangible fragments of a dreamlike, out-of-control natural dimension. An almost alchemical manual skill, unrivalled on the contemporary sculptural scene; a work of tormented precision, capable of infusing biomechanical vibrations into this heap of plastic tendons, vegetal scrolls and bony volumes, which, like a curse, take possession of a void and repopulate it in the most unexpected of evolutions.
These are sculptures of considerable size, chiselled and ineffable down to the smallest detail, capable of inspiring depth through their material polychromy: Massarutto gives us an apocalyptic and enchanted forest. Massarutto respects nature and duplicates it, triplicates it, steals its creative intent and weighs it down with all of human delirium, with beings that seem to have emerged from some unpublished gothic tale, conceived under barbiturates.
Barn owls, wild boars, crows and other fairy-tale creatures observe us, thrusting themselves forcefully before our trembling gaze; because while replicating natural forms has been widely explored as an artistic field, with Massarutto we sail into a naturist futurism, where nothing will remain but the scraps and whispers of an extinct universe – one that, thanks to a backup carried out with unmatched technical enthusiasm, will end up making us feel less guilty and forcefully more like creators. In homine, Deus.
