Italian Icons

A figure gazes upward into the opening of a rising palazzo, while a lamp hangs centrally before the ascending marble floors, its curling tentacles illuminated by small light bulbs. The light fixture, crafted by Venetian designer Gino Sarfatti in 1958, is captured in a black-and-white photograph and recalls a past time. But in a close-up shot that occupies the left side of the diptych image, the modernity of the golden lamp shines against the aged stone, and its title, 2097, speaks to its inventive configuration. This confluence of classic and modern imagery characterizes a series of photographs that celebrate the perennial design influence of the Italian lighting brand Flos.

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Titled Icons, the series features 12 lamps taken from across Flos’ history, from its inception in 1962 to its present-day work. The result is a visual story, captured by Daniel Riera, that celebrates lighting design through the contexts of architecture and modern life. Lamps designed by the likes of Italian postmodernist Tobia Scarpa and the minimalist Jasper Morrison are celebrated within magisterial interiors of Milanese palazzi, designed by renowned architects such as Alberto Rosselli and Gio Ponti, as scenes of voguish modern figures move gracefully through the rooms.

Another image in the series displays the lamp Taraxacum 88, crafted in 1988, that features a collection of delicate, spherical light bulbs protruding from a common centerpiece like petals extending from a receptacle. In one half of the bilateral image, a black-and-white photograph shows the back of a blurred figure haloed by the hanging lamp, while an attached colored photograph depicts the fixture suspended from a geometric, variegated ceiling space. Designed by Milanese architect and designer Achille Castiglioni in the late ‘80s, this fixture is one of Flos’ more contemporary pieces in the series, along with the Parentesi, a simplistic hanging bulb crafted in 1971 by Castiglioni in collaboration with Pio Manzù.

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In each image, the contrast of color and black-and-white photography expresses the enduring quality of the light fixtures––their ability to resonate in the past and the present. In fact, the majority of the designs in “Icons” were created in the ‘50s and ‘60s, and yet can still be found in the Flos Decorative catalog today. This transcendent quality was the intention of Flos Chief Creative Officer Barbara Corti, who created the series and enlisted Omar Sosa for its art direction and graphic design. Together Sosa, Corti, and Riera formulated a notably Italian convergence of refined architecture and industrial design. Just as the series is a celebration of the innovative light fixtures of the country’s great design masters, it also embodies a cultural timelessness: the grandeur of palazzi from the 1930s to the 1960s framing the movement of modern Italian life.

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