MATRICE

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

MATRICE.

THEME AND VARIATIONS

OF SIGNS AND SURFACES

ANGELA RUI

Curator and design critic

To appreciate the profundity of the design project undertaken

by Barbara Brondi and Marco Rainò for CEDIT, it is both necessary and

explanatory to start from the title the collection bears. In modern usage

the term Matrice, in Italian, refers to a die or mould used to reproduce an

object, but its origins are much more remote, with a meaning closer to

the English “matrix”, meaning the underlying basis of something. The root

of the word is related to Mater or mother: the name Matrice thus relates

to the origin or cause of something.

This dichotomy is expressed in several levels within the work of

these architects, who study the world from a sophisticated conceptual

approach and then transform it into a design.

Starting from the idea of ceramic coverings, which have always

been a tool not so much of architecture as of interior design, the artists

work back to the origin of the surface and its decoration within their

own discipline: they look at what we used to call the modern age, where

modernity has also brought an uncompromising brutality, and where the

use of bare concrete became the statement of an attitude to life with no

time to spare for manners.

Concrete is originally a liquid material, intended for shaping, which

can therefore absorb and retain any type of mark created by the material

and mould used to form it. Architects midway between rationalism

and brutalism have used the rough-and-ready language of concrete

combined with a last, elegant, anthropic decorative motif impressed on

the material, that makes the concept of covering superfluous, because its

place, in its older meaning of decoration rather than functional cladding,

is taken by the regular patterning created in the material itself.

There are therefore various grounds for believing that, in this

collection, the artists are once again working in architectural terms.

Firstly, with a simplicity typical of BRH+, they reduce the initial concepts

to their minimal terms. So although this is a collection of coverings for

walls, indoor floors, outdoor pavings and curtain walls, a great deal

of time was spent on destructuring the idea of the ceramic covering

itself. Unfortunately, nowadays there is no space in the contemporary

construction sector for the radical approach of the past, so the cladding

designed for the building actually lays bare the interior, using the choice

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