Five-light wall light model “238/5”. Gino Sarfatti, Arteluce Production, Milan, 60s. Black lacquered metal structure and spherical lampshades in internally etched glass. Bearing the manufacturer’s adhesive label.
Gino Sarfatti is one of the recognized masters of light design in Italy in the post-war period’. There are numerous possible keys to reading and understanding the vast production carried out for his company
Arteluce. Over the course of about thirty years, he designed several hundred lamps; “Almost as if he were working,” said Piero Castiglioni, “not only on a single project but on a general concept of lamp, which he was slowly refining and realizing in the multiplicity of specimens designed, sometimes approaching the re-styling of the models of the fifties and sometimes carrying out more advanced concepts, of a ‘mechanistic’ type.”
The founding principle of Sarfatti’s research in the fifties is movement. Not a decorative movement, but a structural and spatial one. There are two main directions. The first is environmental: long stems that rotate close to the ceiling, multiple arms that are articulated in space, luminaires capable of approaching the user or moving away lightly. Movement can be real — obtained through joints, counterweights, rotations — or virtual, suggested by a feeling of suspension and slenderness.
The second direction is almost cosmic. In many luminaires of the Fifties, gravitational suggestions emerge: rings that surround the light source, point reflectors that orbit around central “suns”, compositions that evoke planetary systems. Yet Sarfatti rejects any formalistic interpretation. It does not start from an image, but from an obsessive analysis of joints, frictions, weights. “Starting from weight to eliminate weight” is the logic underlying all his production.
Lightness is not an aesthetic fact but the result of a precise calculation. Each joint is designed to reduce friction, each balance is calibrated with extreme care. Even the electric cable, traditionally hidden or perceived as a constraint, becomes a structural and poetic element: it can support the lighting body, it can be left free to generate cloud configurations, it can define the overall geometry of the luminaire.
Bibliography: M. Romanelli, S. Severi, Gino Sarfatti. Selected works 1938-1973, Silvana Editoriale, Cinisello balsamo, 2012, p. 415
