His items are strongly influenced by the production process. Matteo Pellegrino works by pushing the characteristics of materials and production techniques to their limits, which become a central part of the creation of the object. His most recent pieces were seen in the exhibition “Invasati”, , organized by the Luisa Delle Piane Gallery: ten unique pieces inspired by the classic shapes of Greek and Roman amphorae, unique objects that move away from industrial production and offer the designer an opportunity to test materials and techniques. An evolution of a project launched in 2017 for the Camp Design Gallery by Beatrice Bianco and Valentina Lucio, Matteo Pellegrino’s contemporary amphorae are made of foam and polyurethane resin without the use of molds.
Pellegrino was born in Lecce in 1982. He moved to Milan in 2001 to graduate from the Politecnico di Milano in product design. During his studies, he collaborated with the Fish Design studio of Gaetano Pesce for the development of design pieces, developing a specific interest in experimenting with synthetic materials. In 2012, he founded his own studio in Milan, carrying out his projects and also supporting companies such as Gufram, Cassina, Promemoria and Mila Schön in the role of project manager and product developer.
“I have always had a great fascination for productive techniques and a very technical attitude towards the project”, he says, “this has led me to look around Italy for manufacturers capable of shaping my ideas, because there are no masters for plastic; I have learned by experimenting and my experience has matured in the field”.
For Pellegrino, plastic well expresses what, from his point of view, design should be: a combination of technique and poetics. This approach, which is well identified in the definition “thinking with the hands”, is visible in the first collaboration with Luisa Delle Piane, for which in 2022, on the occasion of MIART, he exhibited Souvenir, a collection of vases made of foam and stone. An exploration outside the box, where the designer has mixed a Lecce stone, declined in a lesser-known variety called Carpato, rather harsh and present mainly in lower Salento, with a new and light material like foam. Here, as in his other works, the result has been a series of extreme and polarizing elements, which tend to create a break with the landscape of design made of rigor, minimalism and control.
“The worn, vilified, mortified aspect…in short, the subjective ‘ugliness’ that accompanies every object, comes from my desire to represent a ‘lived experience’ with its peaks of joy and beauty, as well as the wounds and discomforts that belong and characterize the uniqueness of both people and objects”, Matteo Pellegrino recounts. “In this way, we can, in my opinion, identify with the object itself by seeing in the polymatericity and overlays the stratification and sedimentations of experiences that make our lives as unique as each object in the series”.
Every project is for Matteo Pellegrino an experiment, an opportunity to continue discovering new materials and possibilities of hybridizations.
