ARALDICA

Araldica: note sulla collezione | Araldica: notes on the collection

a dual-faced entity which may be both his child and his spiritual guide,

both friend and boss, part madness and part dictator. Le Dictateur is not

Federico’s alter ego: it is his superpower. It is not a mask, since in it he

actually transforms himself into an artistic project.

Le Dictateur is both result and origin of Federico Pepe’s work.

“I think ideas are born from predisposition,” Federico explained to me

in 2014. “Not in the sense that ‘we are born predisposed,’ but for daily

preparation. In this domain I believe that discipline is pivotal. The real

talents today are very rigorous people, those who work hard, exchange a

lot, think a lot, and know how to apply and balance many different things.”

An approach which has made him the best-kept secret on the Italian

creative scene, a fact well known not only to Pierpaolo Ferrari, Maurizio

Cattelan, Nico Vascellari, Jacopo Benassi and Patricia Urquiola, but also

to the companies, both large and small, which have turned to him over

the years. He has worked and continues to work with them all, designing

by laying the foundations of designs naturally expressed in episodes, in a

serial pattern which not only gradually builds up Federico’s own creative

story, but also offers his clients designs so special that they would be

virtually impossible without him.

This self-discipline generates heat and energy in such quantities

that – if it were not imprisoned within the geometrical grids of graphic

design – it might generate a thermonuclear reaction. The blood running

through the veins of his images is black as ink, red as sealing-wax, white

as plaster and golden as lava. But there is more, too. His crystal-clear

visions are able to break down the slender membrane which separates

analogue from digital. He sees matter as absolutely central, but he makes

it vibrate with an unusual two-dimensional quality. This can be seen

in the way he carves marble with coloured squiggles, recollections of

faces briefly sketched as vectors. It is discovered in the skill with which

he invades plates and bowls of the finest, monitor-shiny porcelain with

geometrical patterns. It becomes tangible in the love with which he brings

to life the paper of his publishing projects, peopled with highly elegant,

powerfully symmetrical, often kaleidoscopic graphics. It can be admired

in the precision with which a metallic factory flooring becomes fabric on

an ancient loom, after its resolution is decreased from 300 dpi to 8 bits.

It is enjoyed in the hyperbolic repetition of faces and hands in acrylic on

canvas in his painting studio, in which every work conserves copy and

paste reminders of its predecessor. It amazes in the doors of exquisite

metal sideboards, profane glass panels, hand-made but born through the

glass of a screen.

A career which has led almost naturally to an encounter with CEDIT,

with whom he has created an aesthetically courageous collection, part

punk and part aristocratic austerity. The Araldica project’s very name

evokes strength and nobility, and it is grounded in a past whose weight

does not drag it backwards but rather catapults it forwards into the

future. Here, Federico’s digital geometries become the most solid of

materials, taking shape in a graphic object, condensing stories and

images into three or two dimensions. In Pepe’s and CEDIT’s space,

Euclidean geometrical forms encounter the marble of Phidias, the

intricate patterns of the floor of Milan Cathedral merge into the Baroque

images of the marbles found in Roman art galleries, and private space

opens out to the infinite space of a thousand possible universal histories.

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1

“Interview: Le Dictateur’s Federico Pepe. The rarely interviewed Italian creative director speaks on art, advertising

and the power of hard work”, Cool Hunting, 10 June 2014 https://coolhunting.com/culture/interview-federico-pepe/