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Ico Parisi and the joy of making

Ico Parisi liked to be defined as a Renaissance artist on account of his interest in all forms of art and his ability to govern an imagination that respected few confines (albeit a sort of eclectic style of control). This approach was responsible for him becoming one of the main creators of style in Italian furniture-making in the 1940’s and the 1950’s.
Intolerant of labels, Parisi did not want to be considered an architect, an industrial designer or a painter but a person who was sensitive to any aspect of creativity that would give him the opportunity to realise an object that would be both original as well as practical.
In the 1930’s, he trained in Como, a city that was caught up in an atmosphere of great artistic fervour where Giuseppe Terragni had designed and realised the Casa del Popolo, a symbol of Rationalist architecture. In 1935, he founded the “Gruppo Como” and Alberto Sartoris, in the same year, organised in Villa Olmo the exhibition Pittura Moderna Italiana with exhibits by, among others, Lucio Fontana, Osvaldo Licini and Fausto Melotti.
Ico Parisi was convinced that the architectural design project as well as the furnishings should be conceived as a whole. The integration of the arts was a fundamental value throughout his work, as was demonstrated in 1949 by a villa that he built with a fresco by Mario Radice and a piece of sculpture by Gio Ponti – extolling the virtues of his non-secular spirit founded upon the freedom to “do it all together”.
In the rosewood table from 1949 by Spartaco Brugnoli (present in the brief notes on the artist in the volume Il mobile italiano degli anni ’40 e ’50, edited by Irene di Guttry and Maria Paola Maino, Edizioni Laterza, Bari, 1992, page 217), Ico Parisi demonstrated a gratifying lightness in his modulation of volumes and his ability to render the object as light as air in the way it leant against the wall, thus favourably comparing him to Carlo Mollino’s surprising and genial creativity.