27 October 2009

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Mario Sasso & Elica for the three-dimensional version of Leonardo’s Last Supper


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Two cooker hoods customised by the artist auctioned at Milan’s Triennale

The idea of putting your hand on a work of art is usually frowned upon, the habitual approach to such objects tending to be: “Look, but don’t touch.”
But today, with a project that includes Elica’s participation, one of the greatest symbols of Renaissance art, The Last Supper, by Leonardo da Vinci, is going to be transformed into a sculpture that blind people will also be able to appreciate.

Acting on an idea by Bologna’s Anteros Museum of Tactile Antique and Modern Painting and the Milan Institute for the Blind, the Città Italia Foundation organised an auction at the Milan Triennale which was held on Monday 28th September  to collect funds that will be used to finance the Last Supper “sculpture” -  a high relief work  in white resin that measures one metre ten in length and fifty cm in height.

Elica took part with two hoods transformed by Mario Sasso, known as the originator of art involving the world of electronics and also the creator of famous opening sequences for TV programmes. Sasso selected two of the most representative models produced by Elica to work with: the flat-surfaced, screen-printed glass hood OM, and Space, the quietest hood in the world, customised through the use of computer graphics.

In these two works, he combined artistic invention with industrial design, interpreting the concept of communication with one hood, which portrays a street-map of Milan, and paying homage, in the second, to the dynamism of futurism through the image of a group of people enacting a Mexican wave.

And these two everyday objects, transformed into extremely tactile, up-to-the-moment artworks, will go towards the three-dimensional version of the last Supper, on show in the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, not far from Leonardo’s original masterpiece.