ANALOGIC, DIGITAL,

CHROMATIC.

DOMITILLA DARDI

Design historian

Studio Formafantasma base their work in the design world on a

strong vocation for research. Simone Farresin and Andrea Trimarchi view

every project as an opportunity for study and the acquisition of new

knowledge, and their love of speculation establishes a dialectic rapport

with the situations offered by each new client. Whether it involves a

material, a type or a production method, the first phase of their design

process is the mapping of what the specific case places at their disposal.

With CEDIT, an analysis of the company’s past and present was

central to the inputs. Inevitably, since “Looking back to look forward”

has been the design duo’s mission statement for years. In this case, in

particular, the company’s history was a real treasure trove, a fine blend of

memory and technology: on the one hand, the excellence of production

technologies now extended with the added potential arising from the

engineering of large-sized ceramic tiles, and on the other a wealth of

experience build up with great designers of the past, from Zanuso to

Noorda, through to Ettore Sottsass. Andrea and Simone decided to focus

on Sottsass - who started designing for CEDIT back in the late Seventies

- and made an in-depth study of one of the colour charts he developed

towards the end of the Nineties. A spread of colours which gave its name

to the “41 Colors” collection, included in the catalogue of the period as a

real alphabet for what has proved to be a lasting design language. Colour

was much more than just a compulsory step in the dialogue between

designer and producer, since Sottsass had already discovered the power

of the mystery intrinsic to this universe of invention. With CEDIT the

master-designer, a long-established lover of ceramics and their crafted

unpredictability, found a way of transferring his personal feeling for

colour to a wide audience, through industrial mass production.

And this assumption is another factor Formafantasma have

inherited, interpreting it today with new, even more efficient technical

resources just as capable of expressing the secrets of colour.

«The concept of colour “in isolation” - Sottsass explained in a 1992

text - classified colour, Pantone, as they call it now, “scientific” colour,

is something I still refuse to accept. (...) Colours, the idea of colour, are

always intangible, they slip slowly away like words, that run through your

fingers, like poetry, which you can never keep hold of, like a good story.»

CROMATICA

Cromatica: note sulla collezione | Cromatica: notes on the collection

58 | 59