What seems to already be clear, however, is that this meta-stable phase is shaping design in terms of two major cultural attractors: that of the solid past and that of the immaterial future, which ‘stretch’ it in opposite directions.
This can be seen in the Cube vases designed by Gabriella Asztalos for Fendi Casa, in which bubbles of organic-marine overtones (biological-sensory element) are set into a vividly rational theorem (artificial-structural element), in such a way as to bring out that juxtaposition.
This, in fact, is precisely the point: not which of the two polarities will prevail, but how in their opposition the front of digital sublimation of the object and that of the inertial resistance of its anthropological roots can face off. Such a cultural tug of war is aptly represented by the project with which Gustavo Martini has won the Wallpaper* Design Award 2018.
The Grove – the furnishing system created by the young Brazilian talent who has studied and works in Italy – has a composition that is doubled on two levels, in which the lower gathers the rational, Cartesian, modern afflatus of the drive towards the future, while the upper takes charge of the rugged impact of the pre-industrial past of human culture.
We should also underline the fact that the positioning of the two phases, with the heavier one above and the lighter one below, reflects the meta-stable state in which design finds itself today, reaching towards a new future but still sensitive to the imperious appeal of origins.
Then there are objects, like the Spigolo lamp for Nemo and the Terra-Cielo for De Padova, both designed by Studiocharlie, whose key of interpretation hovers on an even more sophisticated level; in these objects, one of the two poles, that of the rationalism of synthesis, suggests – without needing to display it – its counterpart of ancestral mysticism, triggering a semiotic mechanism of great refinement in which the vectorial sign of geometric order is taken to such a level of purity that it makes the supernatural silence of things seem to resonate.
It is precisely here, perhaps, more than in the projects embodying an explicit opposition, that it becomes clear how the evolution of aesthetics from a metaphorical to a literal stage – from symbolic to digital quality – can lead to a process of ‘secularization’ of the object, in which the ancient narrative superpowers are replaced by new wireless superpowers.