Carlotta de Bevilacqua invited Ron Gilad to be Creative Director. After an initial radical editing of the catalogue that redirected the company’s focus back to a range of products for the home and work space - all characterized by a distinctive design and strong personality – the Israeli designer started to create a collection of contemporary objects that remain explore the poetry and irony of material culture. These characteristics, which are true to the philosophy of the company, can also be found in the contributions made by Michele De Lucchi and Richard Hutten who were invited to collaborate with Danese Milano by Gilad in 2018.
The heritage, the atmosphere and the rooms of Villa Danese have been used by Ron Gilad as an exhibition theatre for the collections he has curated and designed for the company.
Starting from the title of the first exhibition held in 2017, "Fragments of life", the artistic director has put back into circulation the codes of identity of the company founded in 1957: function, innovation and culture.
The intuition of the scale leap has the double purpose of ironising on the monumentalisation of iconic objects in the company catalogue and of presenting itself as new memorable landmarks. In both cases they play with the architecture of the villa. On the façade as well as in the interiors, in the archive photos chosen for the frames and in the animations of illustrations created to be static, Gilad is a croupier of stories.
On the shelves, on the tables, on the walls, the objects are displayed in a narration that exalts their relationship with history, the creative process, the typological analysis, the decomposition, the ideal reference, the familiarity with an identity that has been declined by the different authors during the course of the company's history.
