Buio. Utopie di luce: An exhibition by Davide Groppi

On occasion of the Milan Design Week 2021 , Davide Groppi presents an exhibition of unique projects, but also of future creations, possible and impossible, displayed in an original way through a path in the darkness.

I treated light starting from its negation. The visitor is welcomed in the darkness and led through a maze. Artificial light reveals itself in an original, playful, amazing way, as if it was for the first time.

The creations appear as distant glimmers in total darkness, feeble presences in an absolute black setting. They are works of free fantasy, negations of functionality and rationality, contradictions, allegories, utopias.

Artists , poets and musicians have influenced my career as a lamp inventor. I, therefore, built and selected some prototypes, tributes to my masters, ideal continuations of their poetics. In some cases, these utopias are nostalgic gestures, the desire to go back to creating lamps as I did in the mid-1980s in a very small workshop, assembling parts that I then exhibited in a tiny shop window.

Sometimes, making light is just a story. In the end, it is not dark yet.

1. Ceci n’est pas une ampoule: A tribute to René Magritte and Surrealism. A lighted and magically suspended bulb appears in space, so real that it leaves no doubt: it certainly represents an object called a light bulb. But the title states otherwise. The caption challenges the criterion of equivalence between similarity and affirmation and tells us that the light bulb of this first utopia is only the representation of a tangible object that has nothing to do with it.

2. Almost blue: My favorite color, the color of light. A 35mm slide dynamically welcomes Yves Klein’s blue.

3. Fireflies: This utopia is dedicated to Ingo Maurer. I tried to bring Ingo’s imagination to life by celebrating all of his poetic lightness.

4. Silenzio. 4’ 33” : The celebration of the silence of John Cage. The perception of the light source in favour of a light suspended in the void. Once again, a work on absolute light.

5. Millepiedi: In this utopia, nothing is drawn. Simple aggregation of electrical parts available on the market. A small ready-made, almost a declaration of non-proliferation of forms.Thank you, Achille .

6. Dancing in the dark: The synthesis of Alexander Calder acrobatics. Diffused light and reflected light.

7. Notte Africana: The poetics of Fausto Melotti in this lightweight utopia of light.