The use of the signs of antiquity returns in the work of Analogia Project. The Viae collection of leather tables is based on the pavement of ancient Roman roads, while the Bestiary collection reprises elements of late Romanesque architecture in the simplicity of geometric forms, mosaics and decorative subjects. The removal of these factors from their context, and the game of scale, make these references abstract and enigmatic.
With the Ruins collection, Roberto Sironi reflects on the meaning of the ‘ruin.’ Struck by the destruction of the Roman archaeological site of Palmyra by ISIS, Sironi underlines the role of ruins and their capacity to express the distance between past and present. The anthropologist Marc Augé, in Le temps en ruines, writes: “Their incompleteness contains a promise. The sentiment of passing time […] a sense of time that is even more stimulating and moving because it cannot be reduced to history, since it is awareness of loss, expression of absence, pure desire.”
So Sironi designs a collection that mixes classical citations – fragments of capitals or columns, cross-sections of amphitheaters – with elements of the industrial age, like I-beams. All the parts, however, are the result of artifice: made in shiny bronze, the ‘modern ruins,’ and the ancient ones in Rima Artificial Marble, create a dissonant but ideal hybrid, erasing temporal distances, embodying the utopias of our time.
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