Gaetano Pesce on the Virtues of Solitary Birds

The indefatigable designer has died at age 84. In late February, he gave one of his final interviews about staying incoherent, being of-the-moment, and communicating through socks.

It’s 2:30 on a Tuesday afternoon when Gaetano Pesce offers me a cappuccino, casually violating a sacred tenet of Italian coffee culture so rigid in its absolutism that merely asking for milk after breakfast sends most Italians into paroxysms. But then Pesce never did adhere to convention.

For more than 60 years, the La Spieza–born industrial designer and architect has blithely dismissed prevailing tastes. In their place he has suggested an alternate vision of how things should look, often conjured from luridly colored resins, foams, and polyurethane, and which appear unruly, in various stages of melting, or congealing, or entering some heretofore unknown state of matter. He declared war on straight lines and never relented, instead carving an oozing, oleaginous groove through modernism, rejecting its attempts to cordon life into orderly form. Pesce favors the messy, chaotic, and delirious, which are, after all, truer to life.His studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard is piled with the results: gloopy chairs like stretched taffy, plasticky bookcases that resemble acid-hued larvae, cabinets shaped like people, with storage in the chest cavity. The body remains a recurring motif; his latest project is a collection of socks with the brand doublesoul called “Calzacuore,” which feature a soft, fuzzy heart exposed on the calf—equal parts mirthful and emotive.A Pesce piece can be bulbous, repulsive, or rude, but never boring. Many of them smile, in the literal sense—a wobbly grin staring back at you from your table top. As he’s said: “People, they have already a lot of tragedy.”

How are you?I’m a writer.Mostly journalism.What about Calvino?

I am very well. I am 84, my name is Gaetano Pesce. I am 185 centimeters tall. I am 85 kilos weight. The shoes: 44. I like surprise. I like not to repeat. I hate repetition. My breakfast is the same for eight years. Can you imagine? Boring. And what do you do?Literature?When I was 16, my mother had a friend, a journalist, living in Trieste. Trieste was the city where Joyce was living in Italy. And she talked to me about how important Joyce was, the way he wrote, the construction. And she gave me . And I was very touched. He invented a way to write—a new way—and it was very powerful.Calvino I met. But he wasn’t Joyce. I like Bukowski very much, the New Journalists.

When did you come to New York?What do you mean by a joke?Do you feel like the city affected your ideas?

The first time I come to New York I was living in Venice, and because I needed money, I took my drawings in a roll, took a plane, and went to a dealer. He had clients, like an electrical company I can’t remember, selling my drawings to companies like that. So I was coming here and coming back with money. Then I was in Paris, because my mother was alive, so it was close, in a sense. When she died, I moved here. That was 1980. I like this city because it’s the center of the world. There is no joke here, like in Los Angeles, or Amsterdam, or London.Artificial things. Here life is real. And people that are in New York are real. It’s a real place. Here you feel time. And so I follow time with pleasure. My work is following what the time says.They come from observing time, observing people, observing the street, how people talk, how they dress. There are certain values in New York I see repeated in other places—Japan, Amsterdam. London. The things people in Brooklyn discovered four years ago, now are around the world. So New York is telling the world: How is life today? Not life tomorrow, today. The world is living more in yesterday. There is that saying that I like very much: When America has a cold, the rest of the world has pneumonia. It’s true.

You were bored early with straight lines, geometry—they didn't interest you.You were never interested in clones.When you were a student in Venice studying architecture, you wrote a manifesto declaring the right of an artist to be inconsistent. Do you still believe in that right?

The first thing I understood, knowing Italy like I did, was that it was important to know the world. I started to travel when I was young. I started leaving a long time ago. It was very important—at that time, not today—for architecture. The best, most advanced architecture at that moment was in England. So I moved to London, always with the idea not to be too far from my mother. Then I went to Paris and there I stayed for 14 years—a long time. I had no way to survive, because my work nobody wanted. The cultural minister asked me to be a teacher, and they gave me the top position, and so I was able to make a family. I also began to teach in New York, at the Cooper Union School of Architecture, and then in Milan, Domus Academy. But that was because I need money, not because I like to teach. Because that’s a horrible thing, to make people think like you.No. No, no. The way I was teaching was: Be careful, don’t copy what I do. This was the time of solitary birds, I don’t know if it is still, and when they sing they sing in a different way.Oh yes. There is a book that came out, The Complete Incoherence—and that’s true of me, I am incoherent. From the time I was 18, I understood that to be incoherent is a form of freedom—free from yourself. Free from what you were thinking yesterday. Totally, because if you are attached to what you were thinking yesterday, you risk to become old. Old in here [].

How do you keep inconsistent?You’ve said that’s when you realized that nobody was teaching you materials from your own time, which is when you discovered resin.What do you think of the architecture being developed now?So you like the Hard Rock Casino and Hotel in South Florida, for instance, in the shape of a guitar?

Curiosity. Curiosity was my maestro from the time when a teacher in school said, “Don’t be curious,” and I understood that it was exactly the contrary. I didn’t have good teachers. But maybe that was my chance.When I was in school, one exam was Material. I was in front of the teacher and the teacher put a stone and said, “What is this?” I said, “I don’t know.” He said, “It’s raw material.” I said, “Yes, but material means material from today, not material from the past.” I wrote three letters to chemical companies and asked to visit and see what they were doing in thermomaterials. And I saw incredible things: the material of my time. You’re a writer. If you write in the way of Leonardo or Dante or, I don't know, Quasimodo, you do a fake. If you write in your style, you’re representing your time. My material represents me in my time. Foam, rigid or elastic, resin in any color [].This is an interesting question. A century ago, exactly more or less, there were some good architects who invented the idea of the international style, and at that time it was correct. But slowly, in time, the international style became the same as Marxism. Marxism was an international politics, the same administration everywhere, in China, in Russia, Poland, Latin America. Also in Italy we had a strong movement. Between the international style and communism there was a very strong similitude. But communism didn’t evolve, and it disappeared for that reason. Incredibly, in architecture, the international style is still very alive, everywhere. And so you see most architects, they believe architecture is done with abstract geometry. And so you have the same building in Tokyo that you have in Amsterdam in New York in Africa. This is totally wrong. It’s a totalitarian way to see this very important expression. We have to evolve. And evolving means to use a different geometry. A geometry that represents the figure, so we recognize what a building expresses, because we recognize a shape, the story.Yes, for instance. The figure is important, because communication is important. Today if you asked me what is the most important thing in reality, I think it’s communication. Through this [], we communicate maybe too much. Most of the time we communicate banalities. This keeps the level low. Social media is very banal. Umberto Eco, before he died, said that he was very worried about social media. You can communicate with socks. This is the great evolution of design: If you are able to interpret socks in a way that is able to transmit, then it’s art.

Your work embraces kitsch in a way that most designers tend to avoid.Lately you’ve received attention from fashion houses. For Bottega Veneta’s Spring 2023 show you created 400 individuated, acid-colored resin chairs, one of which featured in a successive campaign strategically obscuring a nude Kate Moss.Your designs are for sale at B&B Italia, but also in the collection of MoMA. Do you think of yourself as an artist?

Sometimes it’s necessary. Kitsch is a language that can touch certain people. And without that you cannot touch them.When Bottega asked, I wanted to do something political. And so I did something dedicated to diversity. I said: It’s stupid to be equal, like certain people say. Ideological people, they talk about, “We are all the same”—it’s not true. And so I did 400 chairs, all different. And that touched the world, because it went around. It was very successful. Last year I did for them something called The Grotto [which also included two Pesce-designed handbags]. It was an experience in space. The bag was not abstract. One represented the landscape, the mountain, and the other represented the prairies. Image, not abstraction.No. I am curious. You know when you meet someone on the street who has nothing to do, and you say, “What do you do?” Usually they say, “I am an artist.” But in reality they are not, because artists, there are three or four every century. The answer to your question is not for me to say, but time. In a hundred years, when they say, “Gaetano was.” But me, I can say: I am a curious person. And there is a lot to discover. Unfortunately, people are —how you say ? [] They like things like they are.