On Monday evening in Milan, T Magazine organized its annual event to mark the opening of the Salone del Mobile design fair. As usual, guests gathered within the grounds of Villa Necchi Campiglio, a 1935 rationalist house designed by Italian architect Piero Portaluppi, but this yr the property felt more expansive than ever. Between purple wisteria-covered trellises within the garden and flower beds of sunset-colored poppies, 10-foot-high canvas paintings by a Spanish artist were stacked Elwira Solana. Interspersed with curtains of burgundy Moiré Dedar fabric, they depicted in dusty jewel colours scenes from an imaginary house – cornflower blue steps leading across the corner, yellow door ajar – suggesting that perhaps one other property exists just beyond reach. Finished with the identical dappled, fresco-like effect was a miniature house that floated within the pool.
The evening’s hosts, T’s editor-in-chief Hanya Yanagihara and design director Tom Delavan, chatted with guests – who enjoyed Hugo and arancini cocktails – on the front steps of the villa, while others toured the inside of the constructing, admiring Picasso’s sketches and toilet marble. In the house dining room, Solana arrange miniature picket models of the work she had made for the occasion. In addition to large panels and a floating apartment, her installation included a low-to-the-ground bridge – looking like a row of columns receding into the space on one side and a colourful city street on the opposite – and a set of standing screens where guests, including architect India Mahdavi, art director Barnaba Fornasetti and artist Faye Toogood posed for photos. This last stage, set near the gates of the estate, included two more small houses, accented in pink and purple, brilliant enough to be lifted. Creative director Ramdane Touhami quickly held one above his head.
Solana, 37, often transforms partitions that exist already. For her apartment in Santoña, Spain, a seaside town near Bilbao, she added trompe l’oeil paintings that create the illusion of built-in shelves, a curved colonnade overlooking the ocean, and a half-open wardrobe. But, as she put it, “at Villa Necchi, we couldn’t change the unique architecture since it’s a masterpiece.” So it was each the artist’s first plein-air commission and certainly one of the primary that required her to construct her own spaces – a project that drew on her formal education.
Raised in Santoña, Solana studied architecture on the Polytechnic University of Madrid, traveling on scholarships to other cities equivalent to Ahmedabad, India, and Istanbul. But after graduating in the course of the Great Recession, when jobs were scarce, she began questioning her profession path. “I used to be excited about my future and my abilities and I noticed that I used to be doing quite well,” she said. “And during my education, I missed it.” Painting murals was a solution to mix her architectural experience with a more intimate, direct way of working.
When it got here to conceptualizing her installation for Villa Necchi, she began by exploring buildings whose architecture distorts the viewer’s sense of space. She checked out the Italian architect Francesco Borromini colonnade at Galleria Spada in Rome, accomplished in 1653, and on the Portaluppi Planetarium in Milan, accomplished in 1930, structures that appear larger than they are surely. She also considered the work of the 18th-century Irish painter Robert Barker, who originated the term “panorama” to explain his immersive 360-degree renderings of cityscapes which have been displayed in a purpose-built rotunda in London’s Leicester Square since 1792. Using perspective to create an optical illusion, Solana said, “is a fairly old trick,” but one that also has the facility of entry.
Once she had settled on her concept, she spent January and February creating canvas panels to be displayed by the villa’s pool. “I could paint them in Madrid, roll them up and send them to Italy,” she says. In mid-March, she moved to Milan, taking on a studio within the Porta Ticinese district, where she accomplished the picket panels that make up the doorway and bridge, in addition to the polycarbonate panels that might grow to be the floating house, working with Italian architect Luigi d’Oro on the development site and lighting designer Cosimo Masone . It was because of the latter that, when night fell, the tiny windows of the apartment lit up, casting a red glow on the surface of the pool.
About an hour later, the guests began to go to dinner at 10:00 p.m. with Dedar bags and notebooks and copies of the newest issue of T’s Design in hand. But before they left, they were served one last visual treat: square sugar cookies covered with icing with printed Solana designs.
