Be enchanted by the grace of two poetic and evocative collections designed by Ludovica+Roberto Palomba for Purho: Laguna Collection and Uma Collection – pieces that bring intrigue and mood.
Laguna Collection Purho
Flowing forms shaped by wind and tides outline unexpected bumps, depressions and convexities in Laguna, a collection of freehand-designed vessels shaped by wind and tides.
“It is a great thrill to continue our personal and intimate research on Murano. Today in collaboration with Purho we want to tell and represent, through glass and its materiality, the nature of the elements,” say Ludovica+Roberto Palomba.
Composed of nine Murano glass vases dressed in the colors of the lagoon – steel gray, moss green, deep blue, crystal and topaz – and characterized by names echoing the lagoon environment such as Rio, Bacan, Barena or Ghebo, the collection was born under the sign of expressive freedom, of the immediacy of the sketches drawn on the kiln floor.
Laguna reflects the close and empathetic dialogue between the designers and the master. A game of balances that finds the space of a few moments to capture the idea, shape the material, stop the moment.
“The resultant-in the words of Ludovica+Roberto Palomba-are generous and powerful vases and centerpieces, unique and unrepeatable, and for this reason we worked on a flying handmade realization. No molds or constraints. Free processes like water bending to the elements in ripples, waves.”
Imagined as a composite ensemble of organic forms declined in multiple dimensions – seemingly imperfect cylinders, generous sacks curled in on themselves, vases with folded flaps – the entire collection lights up with iridescent colors and sandblasted finishes. It is the exaltation of materiality, the sublimation of nature through glassy magma.
Unique derogation of the entire collection, the engraving that, like a mark left by the passage of natural elements, interrupts the flow connoting two vessels with tapes of the glass surface like waves of the sea.
Bacan is characterized by generous shapes whose upper flaps are folded in on themselves. The name recalls the tongue of sandy land that emerges in the lagoon during low tide. A vase that seems shaped by the wind and tides and made of Murano glass in iridescent colors and sandblasted finishes
Barena is distinguished by a low form, large volumes and undulating profiles. Its name recalls the lagoon grounds that are periodically submerged by the sea, and because of this, the vase itself also seems to emerge from the sea, forged by the winds and tides.
Caigo, whose name means thick fog in the Venetian dialect, is striking for its large volumes in contrast to the small upper mouth, suitable for holding even a single flower, and reminiscent of the soft, crumpled forms of a sack deprived of its contents. Thus the folds of fabric become sinuosities and hollows in glass.
Canal, like the canals of the Venetian lagoon, twisted, supple, characterized by sudden loops and curves, but also by gentle ripples of water, is a vase that owes its essentiality to the basic cylindrical shape and acquires personality from the undulating and seemingly imperfect surfaces of the glass.
Ghebo, with its broad volumes and undulating profiles characterize, is so named from the minor canals that run through the salt marshes and mudflats of the Venetian lagoon, while Mascareta, characterized by generous shapes whose upper edges are folded in on themselves and a thick clear glass base, owes its name to a typical boat in the Venice lagoon.
Puparìn, slender, slender and marked by a full clear glass base that seems to float the color inside the vase, recalls the elegant and slightly asymmetrical shapes of the typical boat of the Venice lagoon, bearing on itself subtle incisions of the glass surface, similar to slight ripples of the sea.
Finally, Rio, sinuous, seemingly imperfect, was designed from a cylindrical shape whose central section was shaped to convey the idea of movement.
Uma Collection Purho
Purho + Colleoni Edizioni’s journey into the “gentle gentleness of soft designs” continues with the Uma Collection, a capsule of five tables designed by Ludovica+Roberto Palomba.
Launched in 2018 with the first capsule collection of tables, lights and consoles in which antithetical materials experimented with new forms of coexistence and interaction, P + C Edizioni is now enriched with the Uma collection, five tables with resin tops of different sizes and shapes united by cylindrical pedestal legs covered in palpable Dedar fabrics.
“Exactly like Huma, a chic yet over-the-top woman from Pedro Almodovar’s All About My Mother, so too our collection intends to subvert the canonical use of a fabric for a great final effect,” explain Ludovica+Roberto Palomba.
Chosen to embrace the indoor and outdoor worlds, the fabrics bring back echoes of distant worlds and cultures: Aeneid, Babelia and Fr Song-way between references to abstract landscapes, Bauhaus geometries or archetypal forms dear to the historical avant-garde. Or, on the opposite side, to the lightness of summer with geometric weaves with unmistakable names: Summertime, Erbaluce and Basquette. Here then, the textile selection made by Ludovica+Roberto Palomba is not limited to covering the legs of the tables, but becomes structure and decoration at the same time.
To be used alone, juxtaposed, stacked, inside or outside the home, the tables of the Uma collection are a hymn to versatility. Sober yet unexpected, elegant yet unconventional.