TOILETPAPER for Gufram
Text von Gufram
LA MORRA (CN), Italien
27.05.14
Gufram keeps investigating the thin line between art and design. This year TOILETPAPER – with Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari at the streering wheel – came into the project as a privileged partner. On the occasion of the Salone del Mobile 2014 TOILETPAPER created for Gufram a capsule collection, an iconoclastic task at the limits of the grotesque, able to challenge the certainties of a one of a kind company.
GOD
The tree hall Cactus is an icon in Gufram’s Multipli collection, which has become a myth in the history of Design and has deservedly become part of the collections of the most important museums and cultural institutions around the world.
In some cases, though, this myth had turned into an idol that Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari decided to destroy. In agreement with Guido Drocco and Franco Mello, the authors of the Cactus produced by Gufram starting from 1972, TOILETPAPER has created a new iconoclastic version that tends to dismantle this idol worship. The result was that, by the new artistic action of enriching it with eggs at the base, TOILETPAPER invented a new cult object.
SOAP
For years Gufram has tried to find a concrete solution for the cleaning of the house, and above all of the furniture and interior design objects. Luckily Maurizio Cattelan's and Pierpaolo Ferrari's lucid folly has come up with the new TOILETPAPER bar of soap, which is able to eliminate any residual dust and dirt from small couches, lage closets, ottomans, cushions, and the most hidden and insidious corners of bathrooms, sitting rooms and kitchens. A revolution which frees homemakers from their labour and from the numberless different products for domestic hygiene. All you need is alittle water and Soap, to be applied on dirty surfaces in the same way you use a bar of soap to wash your hands. Soap guarantees the illusion to have the whole world tidy, fresh and clean. There is only one absursd thing about Soap: somebody with a mandible capable of a 77-centimetre bite has bitten it. A true mystery.
Gufram retires from the world of interior design. It declares it and turns the page completely – with a tombstone. Because of the numberless detractors who have always looked askance at our company and have accused it of divulging the wicked and blasphemous word of anti-design, the time has come to say stop, and Gufram asked Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari to celebrate its funeral rites. Thus TOILETPAPER wrote the epitaph for Gufram, that, as an act of final resistance, made a tombstone that can be used as a seat or thrown at those who committed a sin, without causing any pain, because The End is a stool made of polyurethane foam and decorated as fake granite.
Is that THE END of Gufram?