Borderline Branches 2

By Cristina Morozzi - 11 January 2010

“Even in the contemporary world”, writes Edgar Morin (Itinérance, Arlea, Paris, 2000), “we can be possessed by an idea like the ancients were possessed by myths and their gods”. Jacopo Foggini, a thoroughly contemporary young man, mild mannered, well bred and well travelled, is such a man. Although veiled by a naturally retiring manner, Jacopo Foggini is a man driven by a passion that absorbs all his efforts and imagination, a passion for the art he practises with utter devotion. He is obsessed by a particular material from which he demands ever more amazing forms, never satisfied with past achievements, relentlessly experimenting to the point of stubbornness.
Foggini is a designer who has broken the mould, choosing to return to the trade of the artisan. Not from tradition but by choice. For Jacopo studied at university not at the work bench. Yet he applies himself with all the eagerness of the eternal apprentice. He is the archetypal homo faber inhabiting the divide between art and design...a sort of new Leonardo with an understanding of machinery and technology harnessed to create poetry. Jacopo lives and works with his hands, not with resignation but in order to gain a closer understanding of the intimate nature of the material he has chosen as signifier. An artist with a difference, Foggini believes works of art can be replicated. Yet he produces manually so that each work will be unique.
Jacopo Foggini has been bewitched by his material - methacrylate, a thermoplastic resin, more commonly used to make light reflectors on cars. Born to familiarity with this cheap, synthetic material.
Jacopo soon became fascinated by methacrylate, inventing ways of extruding it and coaching it into filamentous tangles to make the most extraordinary, luminescent shapes: flying saucers, balls, obelisks, gargoyles and party streamers. Sergio Pininfarina writes in his book (Colourfuse Jacopo Foggini, Banghert Verlag, Art book publishing, 2001): “Designing cars...