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/