Uncover the designer who paints and writes with gentle

Davide Groppi‘writes with gentle’, claims Marco Sammicheli, the curator of a brand new exhibition by the lighting designer and entrepreneur, at Volumnia, a church-turned-gallery in Piacenza.

‘Un’ora di Luce’ (One Hour of Gentle, on view till 26 Might 2026) reveals tales and various curiosities about Groppi’s roots and strategies. Within the documentary projected on a wall, he declares himself a rustic boy – he grew up, works and nonetheless resides in Piacenza, a small metropolis situated an hour from Milan within the Emilia-Romagna area of Italy.

Davide Groppi: a language of sunshine

‘I wish to work with the purity of sunshine,’ says Groppi. This idea and his curiosity in artwork and the cosmos is mirrored within the first of the exhibition’s 5 sections, every offered as a utopia.

We journey like navigators into the world of ‘Notte Africana’, whereas with ‘Quasi Luce’, Groppi performs with contrasts of pink and blue: they shouldn’t work collectively, however Groppi and his lights carry out magic. ‘Questa non è una Lampadina’ celebrates the straightforward performance of conventional lightbulbs, and ‘Il Grande Blu’ is a sea of emotion you would nearly drown in. ‘Le Foglie e il Vento’, in the meantime, was a problem he set himself: to assemble one thing gentle and luminous; the result’s a pentagram, layered by a designer who has mastered the artwork of simplicity.

‘Umasi’, a brand new lamp that may be raised and lowered vertically, is outlined by a sublime aesthetic language. ‘I wished to create a lightweight with a lampshade that was new, not like the standard type,’ he explains. ‘One which I might have subsequent to me whereas I’m sitting in an armchair,’ he explains.

The brand new shade is made out of paper and takes inspiration from Japanese lamps: there are three separate sheets that nearly meet to type a baseless trigonal prism. Groppi admits to being obsessive about paper, one in all a number of fixations, and he used the identical materials for his ethereal ‘Moon’ gentle (the piece makes a dramatic first impression on the threshold of the deconsecrated church). The performance of ‘Umasi’ is deliberate: ’It was vital to make sure that it may be as helpful as attainable,’ Groppi says.

On prime of a Gio Ponti sideboard sits a brand new limited-edition lamp referred to as ‘Vera’ (that means ‘actual’). Created from glass, the vast mouth narrows, funnelling down onto an amaranth-coloured cylindrical base. Regardless of the identify, it performs on the concept of illusions; a holographic lightbulb impact is triggered when the lamp is switched on. It isn’t actual. ‘It’s not solely a lightweight, however an ornamental piece,’ Groppi explains.

In the direction of the top of the exhibition, ‘TaO’ lights are anchored from the constructing’s lateral columns, forming a large V form and highlighting objects together with Carlo Scarpa’s mirror for Venini on a central desk.