The collection’s historical roots lie at the very end of the nineteenth century, in the Vienna Secession and the dawn of Italy’s ‘Stile Liberty’. Josef Hoffmann and Gustav Klimt worked together on their grand design, the Stoclet Palace in Brussels. A glance at its architecture, its use of space and its furnishings is sufficient to suggest that this collection could feel at ease here, in this great masterpiece of European Art Nouveau. WIRE, the new design conceived for Seletti, seems evocative of the period.
WIRE is a line of furniture accessories in painted steel (colours: pastel cream, salmon pink and musk green). There are five pieces, with brass wire fittings: a chest of drawers, a wardrobe with two doors, a cupboard with three doors, a full-height storage unit and a mid-height storage unit. The contrasting metalwork results in some unexpected, decorative effects. Fine lines run across the front of each piece of furniture. Little more than a trace, yet picked out like embroidery, they finally thicken, in perfect geometry, to reveal a glint of gold. These flashes of light are contrived for reflection off surfaces, in three-dimensional surprises. A playful detail, somewhere between whimsical, ironic and functional, lies at the heart of WIRE. Punctuating the face at regular intervals, the brass wire transforms itself into a key with an almost surreal function. This is a structural component. You cannot actually turn it, though it has every semblance of a key and handle. The mood of the collection is a strange balancing act between retro, minimalist aesthetics and futuristic touches. It moves forward, yet harks back; nostalgic, it dares to dream; its vision, the fruit of memory.
