Milano: iSaloni and Melt Down glass forms

A few days passed before I am ready to post again this time about Milano trip, which definitely gave me a number of things to write about. This time my journey took me not only through the beauties of this wonderful city, but through several pavilions of the iSaloni. While there was a great quantity of acknowledged companies, factories, designers and suppliers, my attention was grabbed by Salone Satelite and those it exhibited.

Melt Down Lamps, Lindstén Form Studio
Original Image Here

I got really excited by the experiments done and the number of techniques applied by young designers in their work and definitely the glass blowing was among those. Not everyone could work out their quality with wood, steel and other materials, while glass works were on the top, providing not only high quality work, but theoretical investigations.

Melt Down Lamps, Lindstén Form Studio
Original Image Here

These pendants by Lindstén Form Studio represent such a wonderful series of colours in translucent glass, evoking a feelings of having a variety of jellylike delights on the tongue. Though the designer was concerned with 'meltdown' while working on the series, I still find its visual performance as something touching senses, almost evoking sensation of color-associated flavorings.

Moreover, I think that their shape suggests as if it was made of one of those gelatin substances, soft and mellow. It's incredible how rigid and fragile material depending on the shape it creates resembles something absolutely opposite than it is. 

Zurab Tsariteli, Moscow Stained Glass

Being on my holidays, I went on an inspiring trip to still snowy Moscow where among other beauties I had a chance to contemplate the splendid of the world famous interiors of Moscow metro.
One of the stations which grabbed my attention was Tsvetnoy Boulevard. I can't state that I am very much attached to works by Zurab Tsariteli as i am not impressed by his sense of proportion, nevertheless his small scale works which are a part of station decor impressed me greatly.

Vitrage 'Vladimir'

This work could be called as stained glass window where the pieces of glass are cut to predetermined design with the help of a stell or carbide wheel glass cutter and then grinded. The pieces are attached with the help of the lead starting from the corner. The lead can differ in the profile section and consistency.

Detailed Section: Lead Profile and Glass
Original Image Here

Nevertheless looking at the piece by Tsariteli one could notice that the profile is hidden between the pieces of glass, and they are profoundly more substantial and solid, almost being a 'brick' rather than a two-dimensional glass plane kept between the sides of the came. Moreover, it is noticable that the pieces were made probably in the similar technique as marble or stone sculptures, which is called hammer and point work. I think that the 'vitrages' are made at that point of techniques mixture, where the artist approaches the light picture plane by means of applying a method for its elements as if they are imposed with mass and weight.

Vitrage close-up

Another curious thing about this work came to me when I was visiting Russian Orthodox Cathedral of Dormition in London. While being inside at some point I realized that the stained glass windows are so at variance with the space for a simple reason that usually I see those bearing a different kind of aesthetics: the one typical for Mideval or Gothic Europe. While I could probably state that in this particular church they were made in regard to its architectural component (it was built in Italianate style in 1846 as an Anglican church), the application of the stained glass window technique in order to represent the icons or bible stories is quite out of ordinary in orthodox world and the paintings are traditionally made on a wooden surface. What I am trying to say here is that the narratives represented in Tsariteli's works while made in an alien to orthodox art techniques communicate visually as religious art.

Orthodox Cathedral of Dormition
Original Image Here

St. Serzhius of Radonezh
Original Image Here


I believe that these works are on the verge of mixture not only of techniques, but narratives in art. At some point they could seem ignorant to the history of techniques and the depth of the reasons for their application, while at the same time the uncertainty and playfulness gives a rise to a variety for interpretation.