THERE IS A STORY BEHIND EVERY JOB

It all started with a phone call from architect Antonio Lazzaretto, putting forward an important job, a challenge he wanted us to seize. We accepted with curiosity and some trepidation. Within a couple of days, we were in the house of a famous gallerist in Milan. Lazzaretto explained the scope and importance of our job: providing a new setting for and giving new meaning to a steel sculpture made by the Indian artist Anish Kapoor. The architect showed us the wall which would host Kapoor's piece, a vertical surface we were supposed to finish with hot-iron stucco.
Easy, right? We have done a lot of this in the past thirty years. However, this time it was different. How would we highlight the sculptor's work, while at the same time respecting its uniqueness? This was a real challenge for us. We had to bring attention to the sculpture, but also integrate it into the environment that it was meant to enhance. An exchange among three partners started: the architect shared his overall vision of the house, the identity of each space, while we worked out a range of possible colour tones for the adjacent areas, to best highlight the surface of the sculpture.
We decided not to create sensitive contact points between the steel work and the hot stucco finish, which would be midnight blue. A difficult colour, one might think. Instead it fully brings out the essence of the sculpture: with its shape and size, Kapoor's piece stands out, and the entire hot-iron stucco work develops around this focal point. Eventually we decided to extend the same colour and technique to the ceiling as well, thus leading the eye of the viewer to take in the entire complex of form and matter, which now has an extended scope and is enriched by a variety of possible interpretations.