Paolo Pallucco

His creations are deeply anchored in the 1980s ideology of refusal of the previous decades and the Modernist precepts. Always in this idea of rupture, his pieces integrate many references to the vocabulary of warfare: the coffee table Tankette, 1987 evoking the chains of a tank, the armchair Barba d’Argento, 1986 recalling a machine gun or the coat rack Bocca da Fuoco, 1987 a kind of cannon in full explosion.

Pallucco’s furniture can not be considered and appreciated only by its aesthetic aspect but also through all the references it integrates, such as the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke in the first place, but also cinema, photography and although he is himself an atheist, the Catholic religion— still omnipresent at the time in Europe and especially in Italy. But Paolo Pallucco would not be Pallucco without his surroundings. Starting with his wife at the time, Mireille Rivier, a Franco-Swiss woman without whom nothing would have been possible. The creations are signed with their four hands. He, a crazy dreamer, has the ideas, she, a pragmatic designer, transposes them to reality, making them feasible and producible. If concessions have to be made to the original idea, the project is always abandoned. The designs are thus the fruit of a love story, of a complicity and a complementarity. And then there are the others, such as Peter Lindbergh, star photographer of the time. His fees are unimaginable for the niche company of an already niche market but Paolo Pallucco gives it a try. Lindbergh is seduced and becomes his photographer. There are also a few designers whose pieces he will produce such as Rei Kawakubo : after an aesthetic shock during the visit of the Comme des Garçons boutique in Tokyo, Pallucco offers the Japanese designer to collaborate. He will produce all the furniture she designs for the brand’s boutiques.