Utopia grey

Utopia
Utopia rugs represent a meeting of values: artistic research and manufacturing skills. Eccentric yet versatile, carpet Utopia celebrates the design of Italian artist Ico Parisi with this graphic decoration which explores the art of making visible the invisible.

ICO PARISI
An all-around artist: architect, painter, designer. A tribute to the fine aesthetics of one among the greatest protagonists of the century.

The eccentric personality of Ico Parisi, whose activities focused on the principle of integration of the arts, could not fail to arouse the interest of Ferid Amini, attentive investigator and admirer of the many areas of the Italian project, often poorly researched and investigated on. Like other masters whose themes and designs have been turned into refined artworks by Amini’s Icons Collection, Parisi has not restricted his work merely to the field of design, but at the same time worked as an architect. Also, he personally designed unique pieces of furniture that he then had made in the finest furniture-making workshops in Brianza, still devoted to crafting inlaid period furniture. As well as being a ceramist and glass artist in Murano, towards the end of his intense working life Parisi shelved project-based work, and devoted himself to cutting-edge artistic research with deep-rooted social-urban connotations. On account of this, he was invited several times to various international exhibitions. Thanks to the invaluable assistance of the Archivio del Design, curators of Parisi’s oeuvre, the themes selected for transposing onto the new carpets from Amini’s Icons Collection have been sourced from a number of paintings made by Parisi in the 1970s and later. An important document to learn about one of Parisi’s most prolific times, when such values as relentless artistic research and skillful manufacturing techniques came together.

DESIGN ICONS COLLECTION
Masters. While different with regard to generation, training, experience, and legacy, what unites them is a self-same project: a kind of unfettered, personal quest, indeed, a search for the discovery and development of a dynamic and multifaceted modernity. Masters without limiting their investigation, they have dabbled with all kinds of artistic and technical forms - painting, architecture, design, applied arts, publishing, film and photography. If Gio Ponti, still a 19th century man, was bent on outdoing himself with each passing decade in an all-consuming, playful and eye-catching display of genius, Joe Colombo, whom Ponti held in especially high esteem, was rather a personality who lacked any abiding connection with the past and that’s what makes his artistic visions so prophetic. True blue Milanesi like Ponti and Colombo are o set by small-town artists Ico Parisi and Manlio Rho, with ties to the rationalist movement in Como headed by Giuseppe Terragni. And yet their paths are well marked out, and highly original at that. Whereas Rho conceptualizes his own version of geometric abstraction embellishing it with nature’s colors, Parisi experiments with every aspect of the furnishing project seeking the key to integration with the world of the arts. Amini adopts today these Masters’ great legacy, presenting it with uttermost faithfulness to the originals in a ne collection of carpets.